Beaches invaded as warm waters cause boom. What to do if you are stung
Victoria’s usually pristine beaches have been invaded.
No, not by enthusiastic British backpackers basking in the Australian sunshine. Rather, they are washed en masse by gelatinous, alien-looking blue jellyfish, their stingers at the ready.
Surf lifesaver Henry Kiss said the shoreline he patrolled in Portsea on Tuesday was covered in thousands of bluebugs.
“We probably saw 50 or 60 of them in any given meter that day,” Kiss said.
“If you’re walking along the beach and you see lots of very brightly colored, damp blue bottles, that means they’re fresh and there’s a good chance they’re in the water.”
This was the second time in a week that so much jelly had washed up on the beach; this was a strange phenomenon that usually only occurred every three or four years on the Mornington Peninsula.
But bluebottles have been spotted all along Victoria’s coastline this summer, with large numbers being spotted from Warrnambool to Wonthaggi. In particular, beaches such as Frankston in Melbourne’s south-east and beaches along the Mornington Peninsula have been hot spots.
Bluebottles generally live together in large areas in the mid-Tasman, somewhere between Sydney and New Zealand. But sometimes the wind pushes a large group towards Bass Strait before directing it towards Port Phillip Bay.
With no propulsion, bluebottles rely on the sail atop their gas-filled floats (called pneumatophores) to move with the winds. Half the species have a left-facing sail, the other half have a right-facing sail; This is probably an evolutionary tactic used to ensure the entire population doesn’t get stranded when the wind blows hard.
Beaches along the Mornington Peninsula were clear of bluebottles on Sunday due to north-easterly winds, which tend to blow away jellyfish that reach the bay offshore.
But when the peninsula is hit by easterly winds, as it was at the beginning of last week, an armada of jellyfish moves towards our beaches.
Australian Marine Stinger Advisory Services director Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin says Victoria’s recent influx of blue jellyfish has also been helped by rising water temperatures in summer.
“The hot water speeds up their metabolism, so they grow faster, eat more, and reproduce more… they’re blooming like crazy right now,” he said.
“That’s why we say: it’s time to get jelly.”
Prevention is the best treatment when you see bluebottles. Avoid touching them and protect yourself with a rash guard or wetsuit if you enter water where they may be swimming.
“The little stinging cells of the blue vials have a hair trigger on one end, and when they rub against something, a little harpoon filled with poison shoots out with a force of 40,000 times the force of gravity,” Gershwin said.
“They cut through our skin like butter, but they can’t penetrate any layer between our skin and their bodies. You don’t need much to protect yourself from them.”
But what should you do if they sting you?
Fortunately, the questionable wisdom of urinating after a jellyfish sting has been completely debunked.
Urine is a weak acid, so people might assume that this would be a good alternative to stronger acids like vinegar (a first-line treatment for neutralizing the stings of more harmful tropical jellies like box jellyfish).
However, neither vinegar nor urine has much of an effect when it comes to bluebottles.
“About three-quarters of the time, peeing on it makes things worse,” Gershwin said.
According to Kiss, being stung by a bluebottle causes a sharp, intense pain that is frustrating and often doesn’t go away until swimmers rip out all of the jellyfish’s tentacles and rinse the wound with hot water.
Gershwin also recommends safely removing the tentacles before thoroughly rinsing the wound in seawater to remove the last of the bluebottle’s stinging cells.
You should then hold the area under hot water “as hot as you can stand, without scalding the skin,” for 20 to 30 minutes or until the pain subsides. An ice pack may also help.
Surf Life Saving Australia said in 2022 lifesavers assisted with more than 40,000 marine stings a year, mostly from bluebottles.
Professor Richard McGee, Head of Paediatrics at Newcastle University, said although a systematic review he completed in 2023 showed that the best treatment for blue fly bites was hot water, further research was desperately needed.
McGee, himself a former surf lifesaver, said the number of blue fly stings requiring treatment on Australian beaches would only increase due to environmental changes.
“We don’t really have a lot of evidence about what to do and when. [stings] “This seems very simple, but the impact can be quite big, especially in a country like Australia, where we are so far into the ocean.”
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