Piping Plover Ambassador Deb Brown shares that Good Harbor Beach is currently inundated with Sea Salps. Please write and let us know if you are seeing Sea Salps at other locations on Cape Ann. Thank you!

About six years ago, after a warm summer, and storm, they were everywhere on Cape Ann. Luminescent Sea Salps was filmed at night at a dock on Rocky Neck in the underwater lights of the FV Hot Tuna.

Sea salps are warm ocean water creatures, exploding in population during algae blooms. With beating heart, notochcord, and gills they are more closely evolutionarily linked to humans than to jellyfish. Sea salps are individual creatures that through asexual reproduction, can form linear chains up to fifteen feet long!

Salps are planktonic (free floating) members of the subphylum Tunicata. Tunicates get their name from the unique outer covering or “tunic,” which acts as an exoskeleton. The sea salp’s tunic is translucent and gelatinous; in some species it is tough and thick.