Howelings

 

What a Horrible Experience

 

By Mark Howell

 

A casual cruise through the web sites about jellyfish, specifically those in the Florida Keys, can rustle up a number of comments and curses as they unveil what a horror show it can be in jellyfish season here, which is primarily between August and September; in other words, our summer.

 

Therefore it may now be the best time to forewarn those of your family and friends who might be looking for the most favorable weeks to play in the waters off Key West.

 

Here’s a sample warning that Howelings has uncovered this week:

 

“We took our first trip to the Keys in August. No one had mentioned the problem of jellyfish until we were on a snorkeling boat heading out to the reef. The guides said to just swim around them, that strong winds the previous week had carried them in. Well, the experience was absolutely horrible. There were so many jellies that you could not avoid them and at least five of the snorkelers had to be rescued from the water because they were panicked and in pain from numerous stings. My daughter was trying to get back to the boat and just had to bite the bullet and get stung repeatedly as she swam back. She will never get in the ocean again.”

 

The best antidotes to stings, by the way, include white vinegar and either Benadryl or an antihistamine-based seasickness medicine. The best protection is to wear a swim shirt, especially to protect your armpits (the worst place to get stung).

 

The most common jellies in Keys waters are the moon and what’s known as a by-the-wind sailor and, to a lesser extent, the Portuguese man ’o war and lately, the increasingly ubiquitous box jellies that can give a very painful sting and have become the bane of long-distance swimmers from Cuba.

 

Meanwhile, in the world at large, there comes a warning from scientist Lisa-Ann Gershwin who has made a particular study of jellyfish in today’s world.

Jellyfish, she points out, are not, of course, fish, so she prefers to refer to them as “jellies.” The species is 565 million years old and yet still has no brain, no heart, no lungs and no gills. They have survived our planet’s five great extinctions but are, for the first time, facing change.

 

Any marine biologist today will agree that the human population has been mistreating the sea most terribly. As a consequence, the jelly population is multiplying dangerously.

 

Overfishing has all but eliminated its only predators: mackerel, tuna, sunfish, sea turtles and albatross. Most biologists now agree that the planet has lost 90 percent of all its large fish. Since jellies are what might be considered “marine weeds,” they are perfectly poised to capitalize whenever an ecosystem wobbles, just like rats or cockroaches. Since the outlook for the sea remains “essentially apocalyptic,” concludes Gershwin, we should be prepared for the jelly to take over.

 

“A gelatinous future awaits,” writes Theo Tait in a review of Gershwin’s latest book, “Sting! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean.”

*****

Quote for the Week:

“Journalism is a grand, grand caper. You get to leave, go talk to strangers, ask them anything, come back, type up their stories, and edit the tape. That may retire your loans as quickly as it should and it’s not going to turn you into a person who’s worried about what kind of car they should. And that’s kind of as it should be. I mean, it beats working.”

— David Carr 1956-2015) at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.

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