Totally ridiculous!

In the same news broadcast, I’ve been told that after hundreds of years of historical infamy, Walden Pond has become home to a new species of Freshwater Jellyfish AND that a gator was found in the Charles River!

You know Walden Pond– I don’t want to give you a history lesson… or do I? Henry David Thoreau hung out there for a while to become one with himself and/or nature. And to escape paying taxes. (Kidding!) He was a 19th century Romanticist famous for his work, Walden (named after the pond in Lincoln, MA).

According to the Boston Globe, these freshwater jellyfish are “deeply mysterious” and tiny.

But because the tiny jellies can lie in a dormant state for years — perhaps decades — and bloom en masse suddenly before disappearing just as quickly, people rarely come across them or do not know what they are looking at when they do. In Massachusetts, where officials began keeping track of the species about five years ago, they have been recorded in about five or six lakes and ponds across the state.

I’ll tell you something right now. There is no way Thoreau even mentioned jellyfish. I actually read Walden.

Apparently, it’s hit or miss with these little guys. Some people report feeling their sting to the point of sores and numbness while others barely believe you when you tell them that they just swam with thousands of tiny jellyfish.

But I bet they’d notice a crocodile.

Without entering into the crocodile versus alligator debate, I’d like to point out that it’s just as hard to believe there was a gator in the Charles River. I mean, come on. This isn’t Miami.

Apparently, per the Boston Globe (thanks guys!), it was a 4 foot long alligator. Check out what Advertising Photographer Topher Cox had to say:

“I thought it was fake at first. … But I bumped the log and, sure enough, it jumped on into the water.”

Cox admitted he was a little bit afraid. “Of course,” he said. “There’s an alligator in the water, albeit not huge.”