BEN LAURIE, 21, encountered a bizarre-looking underwater “sea serpent” while diving near Cape Brett on New Zealand’s North Island.

Despite his years of diving experience, he said he had no idea what it was and had never seen one before.

In a video of the dive, the creature — which he compared to a condom — floats underwater surrounded by much smaller marine life.

“We were diving there for kingfish and we had plugged a couple, and then we were coming up from one of the dives when my friend saw this thing,” said Laurie.

“It did look almost like a big condom. It was 30 feet (9 meters) long and more than a foot and a half wide, and it was just flowing with the tide,” he added.

Laurie, who has years of experience in the water and is an ambassador for the WildBlue dive shop, said he had seen nothing like it.

“I didn’t know what it was at the time, so it was quite a confusing thing,” he said.

“We get these little like plankton buildups — they’re like small stringy things but they’re only like eight inches long — so I thought it was just a large one of them.

“But one of the guys touched it and said it wasn’t soft at all, it was more like a cardboard sort of texture.”

In fact it is believed to be a pyrosome, a floating colony made up of thousands of sea squirts which feeds by filtering microscopic plant cells out of the sea.

Each squirt draws in water from outside the pyrosome and then releases the filtered water inside the colony.

“Apparently they only come from depths of 2,000 meters, so it’s quite rare for them to be up in the shallows like that,” said the diver, from Kerikeri.

“A scientist said it’s pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime rare thing to see.”

(SD-Agencies)