Hungry sea lice likely attacked, bloodied teen’s legs

A Melbourne teenager who had gone for a dip at a beach came home with his blood soaked in blood.

Sam Kanizay was immersed up to the waist on the beach of Brighton in the suburbs of Melbourne on Saturday night, remaining motionless in the water for thirty minutes.

After shaking off what he thought was sand coated around his ankles, he walked across the beach before looking down and realising that his feet were “covered in blood”.

Sam’s father Jarrod Kanizay said while his son was recovering in hospital, the family was waiting for answers and doctors had been at a loss to explain what had eaten through Sam’s skin. She said amphipod bites were common and “normally you would feel them or brush them off”.

The expert adds that “It’s just food for them”. “Just like there are mosquitoes and leeches on land that will bite humans, the same happens in the ocean”.

And they are widespread in the ocean, found all over the globe: “They constitute the largest source of protein in the world’s oceans in their early larval stages”, the ADFG says.

“It’s possible that because there was so much bleeding it’s indicating that they’ve possibly got some sort of anti-coagulant chemical that they’re releasing, so a bit like when a leach bites you and it bleeds a lot, it just stops the blood clotting”.

“We thought we better clean off this bit of blood and then realized it wasn’t washing away”, Jane Kanizay, Sam’s mother, told Seven Network News.

Sam was left bleeding profusely after being bitten by the unknown creatures.

Although they don’t cause lasting damage, they’ve caused us enough mental scaring for one evening and given Sam a day he’ll probably never forget.

They are commonly known as sea fleas or sea lice, although Walker-Smith noted that sea lice was more commonly used to refer to isopods, a different type of crustacean. The elder Kanizay said an enormous pool of blood was on the hospital floor stemming from the cuts on his son’s legs, and none of the medical professionals knew what had caused the trauma.

When he got out of the water, he noticed something covering his legs.

University of Melbourne marine biologist Professor Michael Keough said sea fleas were a possibility.

“I think this is quite a rare thing”.

Sam, 16, continues his recovery at Dandenong Hospital after doctors struggled for most of Sunday to control the bleeding. “The crustaceans would have swarmed off that piece of dead fish and onto his leg”.