Glinting in the early morning sun, the dinner-plate-size reddish-brown jellyfish were scattered across the beach, draped over oyster-dotted rocks, squeezed into cracks in boulders, and splayed out over pebbles.
“Cyanea!” I cried. “Cyanea! Behold the lion’s mane!”
Just kidding.
Sherlock Holmes said that in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” when he tracked down the cause of two deaths, eventually blaming them on encounters with the jellyfish.
A lion’s mane sting rarely results in death, but still, it’s not a warm and cuddly creature. The “cnid” in phylum Cnidaria is Greek for nettle, and refers to the nematocysts, the microscopic but toxic stinging barbs that make it a ferocious predator.
“Ohhh, they sting. But there are only a couple of jellyfish that give you a pretty good zap in Puget Sound that are common,” said state Fish and Wildlife marine biologist Mary Lou Mills.
Most jellyfish are at the mercy of tides, currents and wind, and winds can push them onto the beach.
“They probably die between one high tide and the next. And even after they’re dead, they can sting,” she said.
Lion’s manes (Cyanea capillata) feed on zooplankton, krill, tiny fish, invertebrate eggs, larvae and other gelatinous life, and use their eight sets of tentacles, with dozens in each group, for food gathering.
When the circle of hollow tentacles brushes against prey, it fires its hair-like (think stinging nettles) weapons, stunning its prey and bringing the meal to its mouth by its frilly oral arms.
The toxin is a complex protein, which is why immediately slapping some meat tenderizer on it can disrupt the neurotoxin by breaking down the protein bonds.
If you are allergic to the toxin, and are stung enough, you could go into anaphylactic shock. But most likely a too-close encounter will just deliver welt-like stings.
Because jellyfish are mostly water, it makes them a poor source of food for most predators, although a species of ocean sun fish, Mola mola, eats jellyfish off the Washington coast, Mills said.
Sprawled out on the beach, the dead and dying lion’s manes were easy pickings if you were a collector of jellyfish. The jellyfish actually counts as an unclassified marine invertebrate under the state’s sport-fishing rules.
“Daily limit for personal use is 10 in the aggregate, (that’s) most all species combined together. For example, eight shore crab and two jellyfish make one limit,” Mills said.
Although Mills calls them “orange jellyfish,” the color range is wide, deep brick red, purplish, reddish-orange and even yellowish-brown or pinkish for the young jellies.
According to “Pacific Coast Pelagic Invertebrates” co-written by Friday Harbor Laboratories’ marine biologist Claudia Mills (no relation), jellyfish have a far higher water content on a percent-of-mass basis than other marine creatures. This allows them a greater potential for rapid growth, which can produce plate-size jellyfish in less than a year.
The high water content makes them almost one with its environment, according to Claudia Mills; more so than fish or shellfish, which have a lot of carbon and minerals in relation to the amount of water in their bodies.
But since jellyfish tissues are at least 95 percent water, and their parts are delicate, they can’t retain their optimum form without the support of water.
Lion’s manes can be found as far north as the Arctic, where they grow up to 8 feet wide. The largest recorded in Puget Sound was found on a Whidbey Island beach in 1998, measuring 5 feet across.
Claudia Mills’ book “Pacific Coast Pelagic Invertebrates” (1998) is a good resource. According to Mary Lou Mills, “It’s one of the prettiest picture books of jellyfish and it’s gorgeous.”
As is the lion’s mane, if you’re not the touchy-feely type.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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