By Dave Mosher

I grew up in Ohio, a state that does not border a salty sea.

So any summer that my parents crammed our family into a car and drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I was in heaven. Day after day, my brother, sister, and I would play in the warm surf of the Atlantic Ocean. We met a zoo’s worth of marine life during those beach excursions, including clams, crabs, copepods, fish, birds, dolphins, and jellyfish.

But there was one common yet fascinating animal we completely overlooked: a weird, rectangular object with a pair of pokey tendrils on either side. Read more…