This article was published on Surfline as part of their ‘Tooth & Claw’ series. You can see the original article, replete with images, on the Surfline website.
Hands up who’s been stung by a bluebottle? Or maybe, hands up who hasn’t. Avoiding a summer bluie or other jellyfish sting is almost a surfing skill, even if it seems like there’s more luck than skill involved. But why are they there, and what does a jellyfish future look like? Here our fabulous Tooth And Claw correspondent Dr Rebecca Olive looks into the weird world of jellyfish, and gets stung in the process.
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We often rejoice in the critters we encounter in the water. Dolphins, fish, birds, turtles and even stingrays are welcome companions as we sit waiting for waves. Of course there are beasts capable of causing us injury or death as well — charismatic megafauna like sharks, orcas, seals and crocodiles haunt our nightmares.
But when it comes to danger in the animal world, size isn’t all that matters. I was reminded of a whole new world of pain when I got entangled with a jellyfish while ocean swimming off a beach in Sydney. A small, pink, four tentacled Jimble.
Lightning strike
Don’t be deceived by their disarmingly cute name, because Jimbles are a less toxic relative of the deadly box jellyfish, with a square-shaped bell to match. The difference being, so the Australian Museum website tells me, it is the only one of its classificatory class (cubozoan) found in colder southern Australian waters. They float just under the surface and their stings are epic. My own experience was like being struck by lightning, a feeling reflected in the jagged, gaping, necrotic wound my own Jimble encounter left across my forearm.
And so now I’m often thinking about jellyfish.
Not all jellyfish are deadly or painful, but if you surf or swim regularly at the beach, you know a few. First to mind for me are the buoyant bluebottles and Portuguese man-o-wars, whose inflated sails and tentacular colonies of toxic organisms are driven en masse by Pacific winds.
This summer, the tiny irukandjis of Australian waters have had a fair bit of airtime after stinging a number of people over a few days. Irukandji stings rarely end in death, but their sting can lead to complicated symptoms, including intense back pain, relentless vomiting and full body cramps akin to the bends.
But that’s not the most horrifying of it. The most horrifying, as I recently learned in a First Aid course, is the feeling of insects or worms crawling under your skin and “an impending sense of doom”. It’s hard to imagine the need for such a toxin, but it’s easy to understand why full body stinger suits and netted swimming areas are common in many northern Australian tourist areas.
Toxic or not, jellyfish seem to be capturing the imagination of many ocean lovers in recent years. As more people swim and surf, there is growing awareness of the creatures with which we share the water, and jellyfish are beginning to feature. Partly, this is because they’re so common around the world, partly it’s because they’re potentially painful, but also, they’re mesmerising to watch. My social media feeds regularly feature slow motion videos of huge, scalloped jellyfish pulsing through clear water trailing their ribbons of tentacles. When I meet them in the ocean, I find myself watching their graceful journeys longer than I would expect. Beautiful, oceanic, and potentially painful. No wonder our interest is piqued.
Our marine overlords?
And well it should be, because jellyfish are set to be an increasingly common part of our oceans. In her 2014 book, Stung: On jellyfish blooms and the future of the ocean, Lisa-ann Gershwin writes about the ubiquitousness of jellyfish in marine environments. A biologist and Director of the Australian Marine Stinger Advisory Services, Gershwin is enthusiastic but unsentimental when she writes about jellyfish, which she describes as causing increasing disruptions to ocean-based industries and activities.
Unlike many animals and plants disappearing in the mass biodiversity losses of human-induced climate change, jellyfish thrive in degrading environments. As a response to threat, they can bloom in numbers large enough to shut down nuclear ships, cause outages at power plants, delay film productions, stop sporting events, make fishing difficult, and suffocate ecosystems. (Gershwin goes into great detail of many instances of jellyfish wreaking havoc so if you’re looking for inspiration for a horror film in the style of The Blob, I encourage you to get reading.)
There is no consensus on whether or not blooms are increasing as a consequence of climate change, yet as more people use oceans more often, we are certainly being more impacted when they occur. It does seem that blooms increase in areas with lots of human development – marinas, sea walls, jetties – as hard surfaces offer wonderful places for polyps to bind and grow. But Gershwin argues that while we need more science to understand what is happening, we need clearer management approaches to deal with it. In Spineless: The science of jellyfish and the art of growing a backbone, Juli Berwald echoes Gershwin’s argument, but with more focus on the management side. As one scientist explains to Berwald, we need to understand why jellyfish are blooming in certain places, so we can deal with blooms in more ecologically nuanced ways.
The right to life
Like mosquitoes, jellyfish can easily come across as unnecessary pests or, in Gershwin’s words, weeds. But like all creatures, jellyfish are part of complex, interconnected ecologies whose role we will never fully understand. Like so many other creatures, including humans and cats, whales and corals, the fact is that their existence is their purpose. They’re unlikely to be essential to any other species’ long-term existence, but their disappearance would have unknown impacts.
Since their presence is unlikely to decline, we can learn to avoid these beautiful, floating harbingers of pain as we swim and surf. In the town where I grew up, we know the winds that bring the bluebottles (easterlies), and Berwald writes that folk in some places in Hawai’i know to avoid south-facing beaches 8-9 days after a full moon if they want to avoid types of box jellyfish. In Sydney, I learned to swim as close as possible to the rocks, as the Jimbles seem to always be thickest out in the main part of the bay.
An essential service in far north Queensland, Australia. Image by Laura Richards
As for treatment, we still know very little, but it seems that vinegar and water as hot as you can stand are two effective approaches. Vinegar because its acid counteracts the alkali in the poison, hot water because it breaks down the protein element in the sting.
Because I was so lax with caring for the wound at the time, the scar on my arm from my own jellyfish encounter continues to itch and cause me pain. It’s likely I’ll have to get part of it cut out so that it has a chance to heal again.
But the pain has become part of my relationship with the ocean. It’s become a reminder that surfing and swimming aren’t activities that come with a right to safety. If I want to swim and surf, it’s up to me to accept animal encounters as part of the deal, even encounters that can cause pain. I don’t seek such things out, but it’s up to me to learn the marine seasons, tides and rhythms that might best help me avoid bumping into creatures I’d rather not meet.
