Bright plastic piggy banks are mysteriously washing up on South Texas beaches, but that’s not the only strange thing to appear in the Gulf waters.
Just one person alone, Jace Tunnell, a marine biologist with the Harte Research Institute, has found 60 piggy banks on several South Texas beaches this year. He says he once found as many as 14 piggy banks in a day. He has discovered them on beaches as far north as the Bolivar Peninsula and as far south as South Padre Island. Where they came from or how they got in the water, he has no idea.
“This is the most common one we find and it is made and manufactured in the Dominican Republic, so that’s probably a good place to start is in the Caribbean,” Tunnell told ABC 12 News. “A lot of these are coming from now we have found some other ones that have Spanish writing on them. We have one that says Guatemala.”
How are all of these piggy banks getting into the water?
He guesses that some of the piggy banks, those that still look brand new, may have fallen into the water as a result of a cargo spill, land-based disposal, or a container ship accident, but not all of them.
“Once these piggy banks have been used, you’ll notice there’s a bunch of cuts in them,” he said he noticed. “There’s no other way to get the money out, so people dispose of them, whether it’s directly in the ocean or on land.”
“Once it rains, these things are real lightweight. They float,” he continued. “They get into the waterways like rivers, float to the ocean, get into that loop current, and get into those eddies and push up to the Texas Coast.”
The piggy banks are just the latest in a series of strange items he has found washed up on South Texas beaches. Over the years, he has also found more than 60 messages in bottles, a safe, three bowling balls, and even a prosthetic leg. He has also seen boats washed up from Cuba.
“I found a 35-foot sailboat with the mast still up, the sails up,” he recalled.
As far as the piggy banks go, he says the number one question he gets when he finds them is whether or not there was any money in them.
“Every time I post one, people are like, ‘What was in there? Did you find any money?’” Tunnell said. “I just tell them, sand dollars. That’s the only thing I ever found in there.”