Ouch.
A group of eagle rays was spotted in aerial footage of a Florida beach on July 7, gliding very close to beachgoers. By accident, the drone also caught footage of something equally surprising — an extremely sunburned swimmer.
The video shows the three huge animals swimming through the water. As the camera pans across the sea, a man with a bright-red sunburn all over his body briefly comes into view.
“Every now and then the rays would swim really close to people and go right past them without ever being noticed. I live on the water and regularly see marine life like manatees, dolphins, and sharks swim past people unnoticed,” Michael J. McCarthy of See Through Canoe, who captured the video, told Storyful.
“Most people at the beach aren’t wearing polarized glasses, so they hardly ever see what’s in the water around them,” he added.
But it was truly impossible to miss St. Petersburg’s very own Hellboy.
As social media often does, Twitter users have taken the video and run with it for a good, harmless laugh.
One person compared the unfortunately sunburned man to fictional character Hellboy, known for his bright-red appearance, writing: “Looked like Hellboy to me.”
“We came for the stingrays, we stayed for the red lobster,” another joked.
Twitter user @Serial_Comments mused that McCarthy caught Satan having a swim, while another wondered what the stingrays thought of encountering their first “red human being.”
Unfortunately for the sunburned man, one person wrote on Twitter, he’s “going to have some regrets when he tries to sleep. And when he wakes up. And all the next week.”
While the internet has surely had its fun roasting the poor man, sunburns are seriously no joke.
A sunburn usually appears, the Mayo Clinic says, within a few hours after too much exposure to ultraviolet light.
Repeated burns can cause dry or wrinkled skin, dark spots, rough spots and skin cancers, like melanoma.
Burns can be avoided by protecting skin with clothing or sunscreen.
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