Fish find on Sunrise Beach in Noosa comes with warning to dog owners
A toothy creature washed up on a Noosa beach has become the latest in a string of eye-catching objects and animals to be discovered on Sunshine Coast beaches.
Sunshine Coast
Don't miss out on the headlines from Sunshine Coast. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A fishy mystery has unfolded on a Noosa beach after a woman found a creature with big teeth while walking her dog.
Sunrise Beach resident Donna Sennett usually walks to the dog off-leash area with her pooch but decided to change her routine and instead went along Sunrise Beach towards the Chalet and Co cafe Thursday, August 10.
As she approached the beach entrance near the cafe, she saw the fish that was about 40cm long, “quite high up” above the tide line.
“It’s one of the weirdest things I’ve seen on the beach,” she said.
“I was just thinking about life.
“And then the paradox of death hit me.”
Ms Sennett said she walked on the beach almost daily.
She was worried a dog might try to eat the creature.
“I hope somebody can take the poor fish away,” Ms Sennett said.
Ms Sennett’s Facebook post to a community page, asking for an ID of the fish, garnered varied responses.
“A fish identifying as dead?” one commenter wrote.
Many others said it was a puffer fish and needed removing because its toxin would be deadly to a dog that tried to eat it.
Queensland Museum ichthyologist Jeff Johnson confirmed the fish find.
“The fish is the starry puffer, Arothron stellatus,” he said.
The fish are common throughout the northern half of Australia.
Although large and armed with powerful teeth and jaws, this particular species is not known to be aggressive.
Mr Johnson said no one should eat the fish.
“The flesh, and especially the skin, gonads and liver, contains a powerful toxin known as tetrodotoxin,” the expert said.
Mr Johnson said it was not unusual for them to wash ashore when they died as they have robust swim bladders and “not many things” ate larger puffers so when a big one died they often washed up intact.
This is not the first weird thing to wash up on Sunshine Coast and Noosa beaches in the past couple of years.
In February, Moffat Beach man Geoff Feeley found a “mysterious yellow object at Double Island Point, south of the Leisha track on the Teewah side.
Speculation over the object was rife online, and Maritime Safety Queensland later confirmed it was a yellow buoy.
In October 2022, Sunrise Beach resident Rob Watson was taking a lunchtime walk on October 4, 2022, when he stumbled across a “creature or organic matter” between Sunrise and Sunshine beaches.
Queensland Museum ichthyology biodiversity program collection manager Jeff Johnson said at a guess, and in the absence of a physical examination, its overall appearance seemed most consistent with the internal organs of a vertebrate.
Experts identified an alien-like animal with “hands” that left Maroochydore man Alex Tan baffled when he found it washed up on Cotton Tree Beach in 2022.
University of Queensland Associate Professor Stephen Johnston said the animal was most likely a swollen, waterlogged brushtail possum.
$150k unpaid super, luxe car loan: MAFS star’s company’s six-figure debt
A Queensland MAFS bride’s “social enterprise” restaurant group, owes workers unpaid super and racked up debts with loans for luxury cars, documents from the corporate watchdog have revealed.
Muso sets sights on Glastonbury in bold three-year plan
After leaving music behind, a Sunshine Coast engineer is making a bold return and setting out on a three-year journey to play 100 gigs with hopes to perform at a musical mecca in 2027. See what he’s promising some loyal fans.