An Australian teenager emerged from a night-time dip in the ocean with blood streaming from his feet and ankles in a gruesome mystery that doctors have struggled to explain.
Sam Kanizay waded waist-deep into the water at Brighton Beach in suburban Melbourne on Saturday evening, standing still for about 30 minutes. When he came out he was bleeding profusely from the calves down.
“The cold water numbed my legs. I felt what I thought was pins and needles but maybe it wasn’t just pins and needles,” the 16-year-old told 3AW radio on Monday. Washing the blood off his legs in the shower did little to stem the flow from what his family believed was an attack by sea lice.
“It looked like hundreds of little pin holes or pin-sized bites distributed all over my ankle and the top of my foot,” he said.
Kanizay said doctors could not explain the cause. So his father, Jarrod, went back to the beach the next night with a pool net full of meat and captured the animals he believes could have been responsible. He took a video of dozens of the tiny bug-like creatures chomping on the chunks of meat. “What is clear is these little things really love meat,” he said.
