Compass Jellyfish © Piers Fearick

Jellyfish all at sea

Not wanting to alarm anyone – this is just to give you some information  and you can ignore it or not, at least you know. Over the past week there have been jellyfish sightings in our seas and they have been found washed up on the shore. HOT’s Lauris Morgan-Griffiths asked Sarah Ward, Living Seas Officer at Sussex Wildlife Trust what she’d heard about where they had been seen – or felt.

Sarah said: “We’ve certainly had reports of sightings as far east as Hastings, but that’s not to say there haven’t been any beyond Fairlight. As jellyfish are drifters they move with the currents, which run predominantly from west to east”. No doubt they will make their way eastwards with the tides. I have heard of people being stung in Pett Level and jellyfish washed up at Bexhill.

They arrive with the warm weather, and no one knows how long they will stay. They have no brains, so no dominion over where they are headed. They drift in on the tide, they might dissipate with rough seas and cooler temperatures.  A jellyfish is 95% water, it has no brains, blood or heart, they are pretty simple creatures and not long lived. An elementary nervous sysem allows jellyfish to smell, detect light and respond to outside stimuli – both food and danger. I assume, therefore, that human beings represent both food and danger.

Their sting is not too painful, it is more like a nettle tingle. So why are swimmers so frightened of them? It is because they lash out and release a chemical reaction and leave their stingers in your flesh which can go on stinging after you, and the jellyfish have left the scene. Although the sting is not serious or particularly painful, most people would not voluntarily walk bare-legged into a patch of nettles, so who would want to knowingly swim into a tangle of jellyfish?

Blue jellyfish © Barry Yates/Sussex Wildlife Trust

The species that have been most frequently seen are the Blue, the Moon Jellyfish – and also the Compass Jellyfish. They are not dangerous, nor deliver too  painful a wound but they do leave their mark in the form of a rash and an impression of the tentacle lash.

There are also some translucent Cone jellyfish that have been spotted and washed up on the beach. These are not true jellyfish and do not sting.

There is nothing personal about their ‘attack’. They have existed for a long, long time, our human ancestors first walked on the earth between five and seven million years ago, so don’t you think we could learn to coexist.

Now you see them…

Do keep a look out for the jellyfish. They will suddenly not be there – they can be here today, but gone by tomorrow.

A quote from Karel Dekyvere “The fact that jellyfish have survived for 650 million years without brains should give hope to some people.”

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