Man catches giant shrimp (Video)

You’d be forgiven for thinking this was something out of the film Alien.

But it’s actually a giant mantis shrimp.

A couple reeled in the enormous creature while fishing at Florida’s Fort Pierce.

Roy Caldwell, an integrative biology profession told LiveScince that the strange looking specimen is nothing but an over-sized mantis shrimp or stomatopod which is a common sea dweller in Florida.

“This particular group is Lysiosquillidae and are almost all banded yellow and black across their bodies. They can live for 30 years and can grow to be 12 inches (30.5 centimetres) long, Caldwell told the website.

However, he agreed that a specimen of the Lysiosquillidae family as huge as the one the couple caught off Florida is quite unlikely.

The scientist claims to have studied stomatopods for 50 years, and an 18-inch catch is strange as the last known largest mantis of the same species was15 inches long.

Bargeron, the fisherman, said that he didn’t have a measuring tape to record the exact size of the alien shrimp.

Agencies/Canadajournal