Thousands of tiny jelly looking creatures have suddenly appeared at a beach in Gower.
The small transparent creatures were spotted covering the sand at Tor Bay on Tuesday, June 1.
Izzy Mcarthur had been swimming in the sea on Tuesday evening when she noticed "thousands" of them along the shoreline.
She said: "I was swimming at Tor Bay from 8.15pm to around 8.50pm and it was mid to high tide incoming so they were washing up each time the waves rolled in.
"As I was swimming I could feel them in my hands and initially thought it was just small fish but then I saw the tideline covered in them. There were hundreds but more like thousands as they went from Great Tor down the beach to Nicholaston and beyond."
They have been identified as pleurobrachia pileus, a species of comb jelly, commonly known as a "sea gooseberry". They are commonly found in open water in the northern Atlantic Ocean, as well as the North Sea, Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.
Sea gooseberries are often around 2.5cm in length and have a pair of tentacles that are usually up to twenty times the length of their body and are used to catch prey.
Dr Chris Lowe, a lecturer in marine biology at Swansea University, said: "They are a common thing you get in the Bristol Channel this time of year. They have got lots of little hairs on their side and tentacles that they use for eating. They can be rainbow coloured.
"They feed on little animals in the surface water called plankton and you tend to get very large numbers of plankton in the spring as they like the sunshine. Sea gooseberries are reproducing to make the most of the food that's there. We have got lots of these on the beaches."
Madison Bowden-Parry, behavioural ecologist for The Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales, explained that sea gooseberries are particularly common during the summer months.
She said: "They are ctenophores, or comb jellies, which are pelagic marine invertebrates that float freely in the water. They are pretty common across Britain and especially in summer. They feed on plankton and other small animals and will mostly follow the migration of their prey, so this could control their location in the water column i.e., at the surface feeding which could bring them into shore."
