This Scary Giant Black Jellyfish Is Stinging Swimmers In Southern California
Black Sea Nettle via Flickr user Ganesha.isis It's got a three-foot bell and a whopping 20-foot-long body. Eeeep. Reports coming out of Orange County, in Southern California, suggest that a rare giant jellyfish, only recently discovered, is invading beaches and stinging swimmers. On July 4th, swimmers in Laguna Beach, a beach town famous as a setting for great television, came ashore with hefty stings on their bodies and dark, odd membranes sticking to them. So what is this weird plague? The black jellyfish (Chrysaora achlyos, also called the black sea nettle) is huge, with a bell (that's the dome-shaped part of the body) that can reach three feet across. But it's the rest of the body that's so scarily big: its arms, described by the Monterey Aquarium as "lacy and pinkish" can reach 20 feet long, and its tentacles can by nearly 8 feet long. It was only officially named and described...