Raleigh -- It looks like blob of wriggling pudding staring out through a single, puckered eye. You can see it caught on camera, clinging to the concrete pipes below Raleigh's Cameron Village: the Sewer Monster.
It's really a colony of prehistoric creatures known either as bryozoans or moss animacules, thousands of wormlike animals, biologists report. Clustered together in a glistening mass, they feed through tentacles on whatever floats past. More common in ponds, they have turned up in a set of sanitary sewer pipes under one of the country's oldest shopping centers.
Shacked up in a six-inch sewer main, the clusters of worms are about the size of a golf ball, estimates Ed Buchan, an environmental coordinator with the city. But the video footage, captured with a tiny, snakelike camera, makes the monster appear at man-eating size to viewers watching at home.
That may explain why a two-minute video tour of the Sewer Monster's lair has spread across the Web like flesh-eating bacteria, prompting nationwide cries of horror and disgust.
"Mystery Life Form in NC Sewer!" read one headline, followed by this comment: "It looks like meat. HEART MEAT!"
Raleigh Public Utilities Director Dale Crisp said the video was not shot by the city, but rather by a contractor hired by the property owner. Lynne Worth, property manager for Cameron Village, was out of the office on Wednesday and could not be reached for comment.
Crisp said the city first learned of the video several weeks ago when a link was sent to an employee in the stormwater division. Raleigh has two teams of employees whose sole task is to send tiny cameras into new and existing sewer lines and then review the footage for anything out of the ordinary.
This latest footage surprised even the professionals who thought they'd seen it all.
"I don't know if we've seen anything move on its own inside a sanitary sewer line," Crisp said. But shop owners in Cameron Village only laughed, especially those at North American Video, which has an impressive horror film collection.
This isn't the first time a bryozoan has ventured inside a sewer pipe. Denver's utility workers discovered some last year but opted to leave them alone. So far, said Mitch Terry, of the city's water and sanitation district, the weird cluster of creatures hasn't clogged anything.
Bryozoans are harmless, said Thomas Kwak, biologist at N.C. State University. He likened them to coral or anemone, retracting when they are disturbed, catching what they can. If they were to take on the qualities of a Sewer Monster, it would be a very slow attack. Bryozoans move at a rate of 1 to 10 centimeters a day, Kwak said.
"They can get as big as the size of a watermelon," he said.
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