‘Trash’ that washed up on Texas beach isn’t garbage at all, officials say. What is it?

Dawson White

Just because something looks like garbage, doesn’t mean it is garbage.

The Padre Island National Seashore in Texas posted a photo to Facebook of one of its “beach finds” Monday morning. Long yellow tendrils resembling a cord or wire are seen lying coiled in the sand.

If you think it looks like beach garbage, you’re not alone.

“Have you ever been out walking the beach, perhaps picking up trash and you come across something that looks like this? We often get asked what this is, and more often people assume that it’s trash,” the post said.

But it’s not trash at all, officials say. It’s a creature — sea whip coral, to be exact.

Officials say sea whip coral can be found from New Jersey down through the Gulf of Mexico and comes in a variety of colors, including yellow, purple, red and white.

The yellow and white varieties are most common on Padre Island beaches, the post said.

The whip is made of tiny polyps — which each have a mouth and eight tentacles — that grow on top of each other to form a stem, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Spicules, described as needle-like formations of lime, support the structure of the whips.

Sea whip coral can grow to be up to 3 feet long. To feed, the polyps use their tentacles to brush plankton and other small particles into the coral’s body, according to experts at the Chesapeake Bay Program.

Several commenters were delighted to find out the cords were actually coral — and not trash.

“At first I thought it was masses of discarded fishing line, and I was pretty upset by that. And, then, I became informed. So cool!” one person wrote.

“Wow! (I’ve) seen it before and thought it was trash!” wrote another.

“I see this all the time down there and never knew what it was!”

Some commenters asked if the coral needs to be returned to the water, but officials explained that if it’s washed up on shore, it’s likely already dead.

“If you put it back in the water, it will just wash up again,” parks officials said, adding that leaving it where you find it “helps build up the dunes as it decomposes.”

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The event horizon of a black hole is the point of no return. Anything that passes this point will be swallowed by the black hole and forever vanish from our known universe. The distance from a black hole’s center of mass to where gravity’s pull is too strong to overcome is called the event horizon. Leo and Shanshan, CC BY-ND At the event horizon, the black hole’s gravity is so powerful that no amount of mechanical force can overcome or counteract it. Even light, the fastest-moving thing in our universe, cannot escape – hence the term “black hole.” The radial size of the event horizon depends on the mass of the respective black hole and is key for a person to survive falling into one. For a black hole with a mass of our Sun (one solar mass), the event horizon will have a radius of just under 2 miles. The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, by contrast, has a mass of roughly 4 million solar masses, and it has an event horizon with a radius of 7.3 million miles or 17 solar radii. Thus, someone falling into a stellar-size black hole will get much, much closer to the black hole’s center before passing the event horizon, as opposed to falling into a supermassive black hole. This implies, due to the closeness of the black hole’s center, that the black hole’s pull on a person will differ by a factor of 1,000 billion times between head and toe, depending on which is leading the free fall. In other words, if the person is falling feet first, as they approach the event horizon of a stellar mass black hole, the gravitational pull on their feet will be exponentially larger compared to the black hole’s tug on their head. The person would experience spaghettification, and most likely not survive being stretched into a long, thin noodlelike shape. 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Keeping in mind that nothing can escape the gravitational pull beyond the event horizon, the in-falling person would not be able to send any information about their findings back out beyond this horizon. Their journey and findings would be lost to the rest of the entire universe for all time. But they would enjoy the adventure, for as long as they survived … maybe …. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live. And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Leo Rodriguez, Grinnell College and Shanshan Rodriguez, Grinnell College. 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