benpaco
Who's gonna watch you die?
Age: 27
Location: California
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- #35
- Posted: 02/21/2015 01:09
- Post subject:
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Dude nah. That's a Lion's mane jellyfish, those things are fine. First and foremost, they get way bigger (EDIT: for full disclosure, this picture uses some tricks to make it look way larger, but they can get much larger than your picture shows, the largest being 7.5 feet wide and 120 feet long):
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
But their stings aren't that bad. It'd take swimming directly through the stingers of a larger specimen to actually cause you any real risk of death. It should hurt about as bad as being harshly purple nurpled (that's how my marine bio teacher explained it at least) but should go away after not too terribly long and just be a little red. You scared of jelly stings? Be afraid of these 3 (from least problems to probably most):
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
Portugese man-o-war. Y'all probably know these guys already. Not just one organism trying to kill you, but a whole colony doing their best. They're brutal, one of my closest friends has been stung by a dead one and it's still intense. In rare cases it can kill you from not even too bad a sting, but you'll probably be OK as long as the venom doesn't get to your lymph nodes, in which case if you're swimming, you're screwed.
Glaucus atlanticus. Speaking of tiny and hard to see, just look at how small this beautiful critter is compared to the idiot holding him (I say idiot, but that's for dramatic effect - I think this guy is a scientist who knows what he's doing). Why, you may say, this isn't a jellyfish at all! You're correct, but it has a jellyfish sting. "Jellyfish". It's technically man-o-war. See, these little floating slugs eat man-o-wars for breakfast, literally. They harvest the stingers and keep the toxins in them, which means if you get concentrated man-o-war venom if you have the misfortune of picking one of these buggers up.
Irukandji. These guys are usually known as box jellies, but this is more specific. They're really hard to see (see the picture, they're tiny). You don't even notice the sting at first, it's very slight, been compared to a mosquito bite. On top of that, the sting causes "Irukandji syndrome", which means you can expect "severe headache, backache, muscle pains, chest and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, sweating, anxiety, hypertension, tachycardia and pulmonary edema." Also cramping. Lots of cramping, Fun if trying to swim into shore. Perhaps most fun is doom. Doom. You read that. Somehow, the toxins (which haven't even been properly fully identified yet) impact your brain to think that doom is imminent. Your demise feels so imminent, in fact, that even once on painkillers, even once you're not in much pain, patients beg their doctors to kill them before the doom closes in. _________________
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