![]() There's nothing quite as irritating as having a sea nettle, or even a part of a sea nettle, float up the leg of your bathing suit. The dark, reddish bits are the stinging tentacles, which are painful to humans. I know from those coffee-table books that there are some spectacular, colorful varieties of sea nettle, but the ones we usually get are no more interesting than the Moon Jellies: they're small and clear, but with tinges of blood-red or orange underneath. Interspersed with the Moon Jellies are the sea nettles. Naturally, nobody much felt like swimming in a sea so full of sticky blobs. I can remember some late summers when the high-tide line was littered with the stranded bodies of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of stranded Moon Jellies - an uninterrupted line of jellyfish running down the beach, stretching as far as the eye could see. No you usually see Moon Jellies in vast shoals of a thousand or more. The trouble with Moon Jellies is that you never see only one of them, or even as few as a dozen or so. Moon Jellies have very mild stings, so mild that humans are unaffected by them. Most common are the clear, harmless Moon Jellies: little round gobs of living snot about three to five inches across. None of these three varieties are particularly life-threatening, the way the box jellies, sea wasps and (non-jellyfish but similar) Portuguese Men-o'-War of warmer waters are but they're still intensely annoying. I grew up on the Mid-Atlantic coast, where three types of jellies vex us. Anybody who's ever had to deal with jellyfish in the real world knows that most of them are a literal pain in the ass. But for most people, I think, the fascination ends when you actually meet one. yet far from being aliens, they've been around on this planet far longer than we have.įrom a distance - say, in coffee-table books on the wonders of the deep, or in National Geographic specials on TV - jellyfish are almost awe-inspiring in their simplicity, and strangeness, and even beauty. Everything about them, from their shapes and their movements to the structure of their soft, gelatinous bodies, seems so bizarre that no computer-generated SyFy channel alien monstrosity could possibly compare to them. The names of their phyla - Ctenophora! Cnidaria! - sound more like Lovecraft than Linnaeus. Their bodies can be as much as 99% water, making them so much at home in their environment that they're practically indistinguishable from it. From a distance, jellyfish are some of the most fascinating life-forms on Earth.
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