Amid destruction and devastation in Tamil Nadu, the cyclone and flood hit state has witnessed something magical! 😳

In a rare sighting, beachgoers in southern India's Chennai discovered two venomous marine organisms typically found in the deep sea. The Blue Sea Dragon (Glaucus atlanticus), and colonies of polyps known as Blue Button (Porpita porpita) were spotted in the Besant Nagar locality of the Tamil Nadu capital.

Srivatsan Ramkumar, a Chennai resident working with the Environmentalist Foundation of India, reported the presence of these marine creatures along the stretch between the broken bridge and the Ashtalakshmi temple in the city.

“Hundreds of them had washed ashore between the broken bridge and the Ashtalakshmi temple stretch of the beach. While a large number of them were dead, I spotted some Blue Sea Dragons and Blue Button which were alive,” Ramkumar was quoted as saying by The News Minute.

Blue buttons get their name from their button-like shape, but are not a single organism even if they appear so. They are a colony of small predators called hydroids that are often confused with jellyfish, to which they are closely related. As the Wildlife Conservation Trust highlights, these colonies float “passively” along the ocean “performing specialised roles – stinging and preying, defending the colony from predators, and producing more of their kind.” Chennaites may often spot the remains of these colonies washed up along the shoreline. The even more bizarre-looking blue sea dragon on the other hand, is a rarer sight as they inhabit the deep oceans.

Sea slugs, very simply, are shell-less molluscs that come in a near-unimaginable variety of colours and shapes. Interestingly, the Blue sea dragon spotted at Chennai’s beach uses its blue coloured side to camouflage against the ocean’s blue and its silver side to camouflage against the water’s bright coloured surface in the deep oceans. They are often spotted in groups, creating formations which are known as ‘blue fleets’.