When Jace Tunnell saw what looked like a leg on the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, he thought his worst fear – a body washing up on the beach – became reality.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God. It’s happening,'” said Mr. Tunnell, who is director of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve in Port Aransas, Texas.
After all, the leg was wearing pants. But when Mr. Tunnell went to lift it, the leg turned out to be a prosthetic, one of the many wrecks and jetsams that come ashore each year along the Texas coast.
Fancy taking it home?
The prosthetic leg will be auctioned Saturday, along with other curious pieces salvaged among the more than 500 tons of marine debris that, according to the reservation, wash up on Texas beaches each year.
Crispy baby dolls. Barnacle coated boat equipment. Weathered masks. Messages in bottles. Bottled drinks. Even a mermaid – well, a meter-long fiber optic.
Those items and more will be auctioned, with proceeds benefiting the Amos Rehabilitation Keep, a rehabilitation center for sea turtles and birds on the reserve.
The keep was founded in 1982 by Tony Amos. The auction, Tony’s Trash to Treasure, which is named after him, will begin at 10 a.m. at Roberts Point Park in Port Aransas, Texas.
Most items range in price from $5 to $50. Want to bid on one of the creepy dolls? Buyers must be present at the auction in person.
The reserve is a federal and state partnership funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and administered by the University of Texas Marine Science Institute.
The rehabilitation center takes in about 1,500 animals annually, including 1,000 birds and about 500 sea turtles, many of which are Kemp’s Ridley, a critically endangered species.
“Ultimately, we want people to know what’s in the ocean and care about it, that’s how we’re going to protect it,” said Mr. Tunnell. “That’s why we do all this crazy stuff,” like auctioning prosthetic limbs and fiberglass mermaids, he added.
Mr Tunnell said the amount of debris washed up has not necessarily increased over the years, but he has noticed a shift in the materials. Initially, volunteers mainly found glass and metals on the coast. Now the debris is mostly plastic, which can be deadly to Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles and other marine life.
The issue reached a wide audience outside South Texas last year when, in a web-only segment of his HBO comedy series “Last Week Tonight,” a horrified John Oliver told viewers that dozens of dolls, doll heads, and other doll parts had washed up on the shore. Gulf Coast of the state. He described the dolls as nightmare fodder and “the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Burn them. Burn them now,” said Mr. Oliver. “I hate those dolls. I hate them so much.”
(The dolls and doll parts seen in the segment are not part of the auction. Mr. Oliver bought them from the reserve and had them shipped to Malmö, Sweden, where Nina Persson, the lead singer, placed them in talking public bins of the Swedish band The Cardigans.)
Studies have shown that significantly more litter, much of it plastic waste, accumulates on beaches in Texas than in the other states along the Gulf of Mexico. Mr Tunnell said that’s because of the loop current, which brings warm water north between Cuba and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
When that loop current comes into the Gulf, it “swirls off these eddies,” he said. “Everything in the eddies just pushes right to the Texas coast.”
Mr Tunnell and a corps of 40 volunteers survey the reserve from April 1 to mid-July to monitor nesting sea turtles and birds.
The sanctuary sends out two patrols a day during the peak turtle season in the Gulf, between mid-May and mid-June. But on those hikes, the group encounters more than just wildlife, including a well-made boat that the reserve says came from Cuba. Local officials took it to the dump before Mr. Tunnell and his team could get it.
Volunteers have been collecting the rubbish for about 15 years and auctioning off the best finds, said Mr Tunnell, who posts the most interesting items on Facebook and YouTube.
On Saturday, Mr. Tunnell will set aside his day job as a scientist to play an auctioneer. He expects the mermaid to be the big item.
“I’ll say ridiculous things to try and raise the bid, but it’s all fun to do,” he said. People are often attracted to scary dolls, he said. “Why they want it, I have no idea.”