Well, it may not be summer just yet, but there are new visitors from far away who've arrived at the Jersey shore.

A Monmouth University student has stumbled upon invasive enemies making their home on local beaches.

The sea creatures are originally from the rocky coasts of the British Isles.

So how they got here and how they might affect New Jersey's coastal ecosystems is still unclear.

Ted Goldberg went down the shore to learn more.

It's kind of crazy.

I still find it hard to believe.

A year and a half ago, Diederik Boonman stopped by the beach for a homework assignment.

What he saw that day led to him being published in an international science journal for being the first person to document an invasive species of anemone in North America.

I went to step further, and I wanted to identify everything that I was seeing, and I found this anemone, that I didn't know what it was.

And I started doing some research online, found out what it was, but I couldn't find any information of it being in the U.S..

This is the first time that I've given a homework assignment that has led to a peer reviewed publication and discovery of a newly introduced marine species, for sure.

Monmouth professor Jason Adolf is proud of Bowman's work.

He was the guy who assigned that homework in the first place.

He did the research, came back to me, said, I think it's I think it's introduced.

I think it's invasive.

And it all snowballed from there.

We contacted collaborators in the U.K. to do genetic testing.

There are more than a thousand species of anemone worldwide, and a few of them have been a part of New Jersey's ecosystem for a while.

The beetle anemone.

This guy right here sparked a little bit of confusion before Bowman's work was published.

The taxonomy of this specific species of an enemy seems to be somewhat of a mess.

There is disagreement about whether, there's a number of different morpho types or morphological types should be included in one species or separate out into different species.

So there was a time where we weren't quite sure what we were looking at.

What they're looking at is the beetle anemone, which has been seen on New Jersey's groins or jetties for about four years, but has only now been proven to be a unique species.

It's an invasive species.

And the next question is how it will affect the waters down the shore.

That's kind of a difficult question.

I think it definitely will affect it, obviously, but simply by looking at some of the behavior that we're noticing here compared to their native ecosystem, they behave somewhat differently.

We're seeing them a lot like very close together.

We're in England, in northern Europe, they're very spread apart.

The anemone retracts its tentacles when there isn't enough water around, so they don't look like what you might imagine.

They tend to live in crevices and wedge themselves in the space between white barnacles and black mussels.

They're competing against mussels for space, and they're kind of pushing them out.

So that's kind of the only thing that I can say for certain is the effect, I'm sure.

Also competing for food from where they're found on the on the, on the rocks are definitely competing with the mussels and in some cases outcompeting the mussels for that, that kind of lower, wetter location on the the rocks there.

Bowman is a senior at Monmouth, and while he's not happy about the possible threat from an invasive species, he's putting this discovery high up on his resume and hopes it will help his career.

When people try to work with this anemone in the U.S.

They'll have to, credit our publication.

And, yeah, that's just, a great thing for my career.

Obviously, it's sad to see, organisms invading areas where they're not supposed to be ecologically, but for me, for my career, I think that's a very big step.

We do value that, and we try to encourage our students to get involved and research and publish.

But the fact is, it's very hard.

And to lead a paper on a publication the way Diedrich did, takes a lot of commitment and and time commitment and time that helped Boonman get published and put the anemone squarely on our radar in deal.

I'm Ted Goldberg, NJ Spotlight News.