Snorkeller makes an alarming find
An Aussie snorkeller spotted something unusual while swimming in Emily Bay on Norfolk Island.
Susan Prior was watching the fish swim past her when she caught sight of a mullet swimming with something shiny wrapped around it.
Alarmed, Prior thought it might have been a plastic collar from a juice or milk bottle and another reminder of just how polluted the oceans are becoming.
It wasn’t until she had a closer look that she saw it wasn’t plastic at all, but what appeared to be a gold wedding ring.
“Yesterday, I saw another mullet with a ring collar, but this one looked a shiny metallic gold, with a lot less algal growth compared to the plastic ones,” she wrote on her blog.
“Sometimes these rings escape into the wild, and this is the sad consequence,” she added.
She said that since mullets feed by snuffling through the sand, it’s easy for any kind of rings to slip over the noses and become stuck.
Prior snapped some photos of the fish and later logged into a community social page to find a post about a man who had lost his wedding ring in the bay.
“I decided to see if I could find the possible owner,” she said. “It didn’t take long for my suspicion to be confirmed; we now have a poor mullet weighed down with someone’s (expensive) gold wedding ring.”
Though the owner of the wedding ring, Nathan Reeves, now has an idea of where the ring is, the task of reclaiming it won’t be easy.
Prior told Newsweek a group of men from the island will be attempting to catch the fish and gently remove the ring. This is sure to be a challenge due to the “very skittish” behaviour mullets are known for.
“We need to get quite a few of us in there to corral it and then use a throw net to try and catch it,” she told the publication.
Despite the difficulty, Prior is looking forward to seeing the ring retrieved and returned to its owner.
She wrote on her blog, “Here’s hoping we can deliver a happy ending to his story and for the owner of the wedding ring! The mullet has a life to live and it’s only fair he gets to live it.”
Image credit: Susan Prior / norfolkislandtime.com