A travel writer and snorkeler captured underwater images of a mullet fish donning a gold wedding band wrapped around its inches-long body.
An Australian snorkeler spotted a small silvery fish wearing a gold wedding band around its head and posted a photo to try to reunite the ring with its rightful owner.
"Yesterday I saw a mullet with a ring around them. These fish snuffle through the sand to get their food. A ring, usually a plastic one, will flip easily over their heads," said travel writer and snorkeller, Susan Prior, who publishes her writing and photography on her blog called Norfolk Island Time. "I've seen them with plastic rings a couple of times, but this one looked different."
A few weeks before her discovery, Prior, who lives on Norfolk Island an Australian island nearly 1,000 miles off of its east coast in the South Pacific, joined a team of beach cleaners to help pick up trash. She urges her readers to keep their beaches clean.
When Prior made the shocking discovery, she recalled a local community member posting about a large man's wedding ring that had gone missing in the bay earlier this year.
"I decided to see if I could find the possible owner," Prior wrote. "It didn't take long for my suspicion to be confirmed. We now have a poor mullet weighed down with someone's (expensive) gold wedding ring."
"We have found the owner, via a community Facebook page, but not yet caught the fish," Prior wrote in an email to Inside Edition Digital. "The owner is organising friends and relatives to try and catch it, but it will be difficult. And hopefully, release it alive if they do get it."
Ultimately, Prior called the sight "gut-wrenching," adding to her readers that human waste is a major environmental hazard to wildlife.
For now, she hopes the mullet stays safe and asks that people "snip those plastic rings" and "try to keep hair ties in your hair."
