Box Jellyfish

• The Box Jellyfish is also known as the Marine Stinger or Sea Wasp.
  
•  A large Box jellyfish contains enough poison to kill 60 adults
  
•  The Box jellyfish can kill an adult in four minutes. In some cases the heart slows down or stops almost immediately. It also attacks the respiratory and lymphatic systems. A 38-year-old man was stung near Townsville in Australia, and died in 10 minutes.
  
•  For a fully-grown jellyfish, the bell, or body, can be as large as a basketball, and it might have 60 tentacles up to 3 metres long. However, as it is almost completely transparent, the bell is often difficult to see, and the tentacles are almost invisible.
  
•  Each tentacle carries millions of poison capsules called nematocysts. Each one acts like a hypodermic needle injecting its poison directly into the skin. So unlike a venomous snake, which usually bites in one place only, the box jellyfish can inject its poison over a wide area, making it much more difficult to treat.
  
•  The nematocysts are only 0.5mm long, and operate mechanically, but they are stimulated by chemicals found on the surface of fish, shellfish and animals. Normally they are curled up inside the tentacle, but when fired they release in 3/1000 of a second.
  
•  They can swim in bursts of up to 5 feet per second.
  
•  70 people are known to have been killed in Australia alone by Box Jellyfish last century.
  
•  Antivenom has been available for the last thirty years, but has to be administered quickly in order to be successful.