5 inches long and very hard I inadvertently brought this home in a bucket of seaweed for the garden, picked up on a beach on the east side of Vancouver Island. It might have been swept up by the recent king tides and washed out to sea or dumped overboard from some vessel or??? Can't find anything like it online. I will be planting it into a pot just to see what it is but thought I'd ask here first. It may be something we do not want growing here. Or it may be something exotic and fun. A mystery to me. Any ideas?
I've never seen ones like that. Tamarinds, different sea grasses, and other pods or rhizomes of course, but nothing so big and lumpy and dark. My experience is limited to the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. Since I have a minor interest in things like this, I've often visited Drift Seeds and Drift Fruits for beach oddities. It's from 1998 but he still keeps the site going. Lots of interesting stuff... Then for you I searched just a little farther and found a site that sells sea beans. They have pics of what they have and it's way more than I've amassed, but may suffer from the same provincialism as my collection. What are Sea-Beans? I didn't explore. And last, it occurs to me that these rhizomes may simply be sea drift from dumping of yard waste, perhaps not something that grows right on the shore, but more inland. Good luck.
I'd guess it's a strand of bull kelp that's become tightly wound...I've seen them washed up on beaches and dried out, and the smaller whips/tips (which tend not to be hollow like the larger ones, or come from the very tip which is also mostly solid) sometimes dry into something hard and rock like--so much so that you can saw through it and make buttons. Perhaps this was such a piece that spent some time dry on a beach, and was washed back out to sea....
Thanks for the ideas. I did plant it in a pot and will just have to wait and see. I have gathered seaweed for years and have never seen anything like this wash up before.
