Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Von here. If sharks can have a week all their own, why not jellyfish? Is it because jellyfish don't have a menacing maw or a fear inducing dorsal fin? Is it because no one's made a thrilling movie where jellyfish terrorized beach goers? Or is it because jellyfish look like squished gummy bears with spaghetti strands
for tentacles. Whatever the reason, as we have discussed on the show before, there's a type of jellyfish that's more menacing than the most threatening shark. They're a number of species in the biological class Kubazolla, but are more commonly referred to as box jellyfish. Unlike they're merely annoying lightly stinging cousins, the box jellyfish has a powerful venom how powerful.
One type of boxy, the Australian box jellyfish, is so poisonous that if one of its six foot that's nearly two meter long tentacles touches you, it's possible you might die before you reach the shore. It's considered the most venomous marine animal on the planet, which is impressive because lots of marine life is not messing around. Take for example,
another box jellyfish with scientific name Karakea Barnessi. It's Lilliputian by comparison, usually under an inch long or about twenty five millimeters, but their sting can cause severe pain, headaches, nausea, and anxiety that can last for days and require hospitalization. A box jellyfish generally live in their own neighborhoods in the Indo Pacific Ocean and in the waters off of northern Australia, though they also inhabit the waters around Hawaii and off the Gulf Coast and East Coast of the
United States. Only a handful of species can be found in all three oceans. Also known as sea wasps and marine stingers, A box jellyfish, a class that includes some fifty described species, can have up to fifteen tentacles with
about five thousand stinging cells known as nidocysts. Each of those cells contains a tiny capsule that can fire microscopic stingers into its prey at more than thirty five miles or sixty kilometers per hour, releasing a toxin that can cause a rapid spike in blood pressure, which causes the heart to seize up and kills the victim. Although no one has kept an official fatality record. For example, in the Philippines alone, between twenty and forty people die each
year from box jellyfish stings. Experts say the mortality rate around the world is higher than what's reported because doctors often misdiagnosed the symptoms or simply get the cause of death wrong. Well, what is known is just forty three species of box jellyfish together cause more deaths and injuries than all sharks, stingrays, and sea snakes combined. You'd have better odds of surviving if bitten by a black widow.
Box jellyfish are curious breed. For one thing, they have two dozen eyes, most of which have lenses, corneas, and irises. In other words, they can see pretty well, whereas the anatomy of a regular jellyfish only allows them to distinguish light from dark. Box jellyfish also have a more advanced nervous system than their cousins, allowing them to quickly avoid and engage objects, and, unlike other species of jellyfish that wait for their meals, boxes swim around and actively hunt
their prey. They propelled through the water by opening and shutting their bell shaped heads like an umbrella in a rainstorm, and can travel. It speeds around four miles an hour that's about six and a half kilometers per hour. For the article this episode is based on How's to Forks spoke with Dr Angel Nagahara, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the world's foremost expert on box jellyfish. She explains that the box jellyfish does
not release venom like a rattlesnake would. Instead, one of box stings release is a digestive cocktail that helps the creature catch and digest its meals. In humans, however, she said that that digestive cocktail acts like a quote molecular buckshot, causing holes in all of our cells. A person's heart can stop and as little as five minutes. So what should you do if you are stung by a box jellyfish?
The Nakahara has been stung several times by boxes and survived, and she studied the most common remedies, such as removing tentacles, rinsing the bite with vinegar, or applying ice. She and her colleagues found that those and other common remedies made the sting even worse. She said that the best way to treat a box jelly sting is to seek immediant emergency assistance. She also helped develop a venom inhibitor cream that,
if available, can be applied to the wound. Bus jellyfish are among the oldest animals on the planet, dating back at least six hundred million years, having survived several mass extinctions. Their numbers, as that of all jellyfish are g wing exacerbated by warming oceans and oxygen depleting fertilizers that eventually find their way into the water, which in the end is actually bad for their environments. In Agihara said, we're a greater threat to them than they are to us.
Today's episode is based on the article box jellyfish World's most venomous sea creature on house to forks dot com, written by John Paritano. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with house to forks dot com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,