The original poster shared they discovered the dead marine animal near Dana Point, California, and it was that detail along with the clear photos that helped identify the unsightly organism.\n

Tim Daly, a California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesperson, told SFGATE, he agreed with the majority of the comments on Reddit identifying the bloated animal.\n

It\u2019s likely a dead moray eel, though this particular one \u201clooks a little bleached out from being dead.\u201d\n

It\u2019s not uncommon to find moray eels living in the water off the coast of Southern California as they are known to live among reefs in shallow water.\n

Although they are not poisonous nor are they considered particularly aggressive, it\u2019s best to avoid them. If they feel threatened they will bite and use their two rows of razor sharp teeth to latch on.\n

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Redditors who helped identify the eel took much joy in responding to the original post.\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a moray. Go back tonight to confirm. If the moon hits it\u2019s eyes like a big pizza pie that\u2019s a Moray,\u201d one person wrote.\n

\u201cWhen the jaws open wide, and there\u2019s more jaws inside, that\u2019s a Moray,\u201d another added.\n

\u201cWhen the jaws open wide and there\u2019s more jaws inside, that\u2019s a moray\u2026\u201d someone else chimed in.\n

I don\u2019t know about you, but I would hate to encounter this creature in the ocean!\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A sea creature straight out of a nightmare washed up onto the shore of a Southern California beach recently. Its appearance was so ghastly that the images of it posted to Reddit were marked not safe for work. The original poster shared they discovered the dead marine animal near Dana Point, California, and it was …\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":88115,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[670],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88116,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88111\/revisions\/88116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}