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Thousands of mysterious objects land on shore
HAMPTON - Maritime tumbleweed? Whelk egg cases? Plastic fishing line? Extraterrestrial seed pods? Natural cleansers?
Everyone has a theory over the tens of thousands of round Brillo pad-like balls washed up with the incoming tide last weekend along the coast off Hampton.
[...]
"They look man-made to me," said Ellen Goethel, a marine biologist who serves on the Hampton Conservation Commission, when she first looked at the balls, hundreds of which remained at the high water mark at the beach into Wednesday.
[...]
"It could be sheets of plastic threads, like carpet threads, that were broken up, carried by the waves and rolled up into balls as it came in ..."
[...]
Though Goethel couldn't find anything in any marine biology books that corresponds to the balls, after visiting with some local fisherman, she decided the balls could be some kind of sea grass.
"Under magnification, they seem to have some sort of molecular structure," she said.