The sun is shining, you're rolling in the waves, showing off the toned torso you worked on at the gym all winter.
Suddenly a sharp, burning sensation hits your skin.
You've just been stung by a jellyfish.
If experts' warnings are
true, swimmers around the world can expect to experience these unwanted
love taps in greater numbers than ever before.
"Jellyfish and tourism are not happy bedfellows," says Dr. Lisa-Ann Gershwin, author of the recently published book, "Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean."
Despite being smaller than a pinky nail, the irukandji jellyfish is one of the world's most toxic animals.
Gershwin says popular
beach resorts around the world are seeing huge increases in jellyfish
"bloom" activity, a result of overfishing and changing water
temperatures.
"The French and Spanish
Rivieras, Chesapeake Bay, the Great Barrier Reef, Hawaii ... some of the
numbers are staggering," says the American scientist who's now based in
Australia.
"In Hawaii there have
been times that 800 or 1,000 people have been stung in a day. In Spain
or Florida, it's not uncommon in recent years for a half a million
people to be stung during an outbreak. These numbers are simply
astonishing."
At the beginning of
October, a large amount of jellyfish inhabiting a cooling-water intake
at a Swedish nuclear plant caused operators to manually shut down production at its largest reactor.
More: Jellyfish prompt nuclear shutdown
In Ireland, a jellyfish bloom reportedly killed thousands of farmed salmon, according to the Irish Times.
This past summer, southern Europe experienced one of its worst jellyfish infestations ever. Experts there have been reporting a steady increase in the number of jellyfish in the Mediterranean Sea for years.
According to a report
titled "Review of Jellyfish Blooms in the Mediterranean and Black Sea,"
written by Fernando Borea for the General Fisheries Commission for the
Mediterranean and the United Nations, scientists are catching up to what
travelers in the Med have been experiencing for years.
"In the last decade ...
the media are reporting on an increasingly high number of gelatinous
plankton blooms," reads the report. "The reason for these reports is
that thousands of tourists are stung, fisheries are harmed and even
impaired by jellyfish."
Although noting that
significant jellyfish blooms "have been known since ancient times and
are part of the normal functioning of the oceans," the report cites
global warming and global overfishing (which removes jellyfish
predators) as causes for exploding jellyfish populations in recent
years.
A diver attaches a sensor to a large Nomura's jellyfish off the
coast of Komatsu in northern Japan. Large schools of these giant
jellyfish, which have bodies ranging one to 1.5 meters in diameter,
drift into Japanese waters in autumn and damage coastal fisheries.
The situation in the
Mediterranean was dire enough to prompt Britain's foreign office to
issue a warning to its citizens vacationing along Europe's southern
coast to watch out for jellyfish.
The world's deadliest jellyfish
There are more than 2,000 species of jellyfish swimming through the world's waters.
Most stings are completely harmless. Some will leave you in excruciating pain.
Then there are the killers.
Many of the world's deadliest jellyfish are box jellyfish, which refers to the species' cube-shaped meduae.
"There are several
species of big box jellyfish that have caused many deaths -- these
include chironex fleckeri in Australia, chironex quadrigatus in Japan
and related species in Thailand, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia," says
associate professor Jamie Seymour, a venom biologist at Australia's
James Cook University.
Also known as the sea
wasp and the northern Australian box jellyfish, the chironex fleckeri is
possibly the worlds most venomous animal.
Its tentacles can reach
lengths of up to three meters long, while its bell is about the size of a
human head. It can be found throughout the tropical waters of the
Indo-Pacific.
A close cousin and fellow contender for the "world's most venomous" cup is the Irukandji, which is the size of a thimble.
Good luck scanning the waters for that one before you leap in.
"How toxic they are is just phenomenally frightening and equally fascinating," says Gershwin.
"Just the lightest brush
-- you don't even feel it -- and then, whammo, you're in more pain than
you ever could have imagined, and you are struggling to breathe and you
can't move your limbs and you can't stop vomiting and your blood
pressure just keeps going up and up.
"It is really surprising
how many places they occur around the world -- places you would never
expect: Hawaii, Caribbean, Florida, Wales, New Caledonia, Thailand,
Malaysia, Philippines, India ... as well as Australia."
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