What is wrong with these tomatoes?

What happened to these tomatoes? Were they covered in sand? What for? Is it tastier this way? And why do they look kind of stale? Are they withered? Okay, we will tell you what it is. This is Viña del Mar, a city on the Pacific coast of Chile. Here is a beach. Do you see the rocks in the surf?

And if you look closely at the stones, you can see that there is something on them, some kind of growth. Algae or mussels…

But it is neither one nor the other. These are amazing animals, which the locals call "pyure", and the official Latin name for these creatures is pyura chilensis. Here's what they look like up close:

These very ancient (hundreds of millions of years older than the first mollusks) animals stick to rocks or the seabed in the high tide zone and pass water through them, feeding on microscopic algae.

Pyure looks like stones or corals. But if you cut the “stone” with a knife, a bright red filling is found inside. That's why they were called pyura chilensis - Latin for "bloody stone":

In fact, the pyure shell is not mineral. It does not consist of calcium carbonate, like mollusk shells, but of tunicin, an organic substance similar in composition to plant fiber. This is the only case when plant fiber is found in the body of animals!

The locals gather pyure, extract them from the tunicin shell...

This is not an easy task, it requires caution and some skill, you can break a knife and cut your hand – in this case you may have a real “bloody stone”!

And then... As you can easily guess, well, of course they eat pyura chilensis.

They gobble it up right in its raw form, seasoning with onions, herbs and lemon juice.

The opinions of Europeans about the taste of the sea delicacy differ. Some say it's delicious, while others say that pyure is most similar to algae-scented soap. Have you ever tried pyura chilensis?