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.
The box jellyfish has stung many people over the years & not every one who is stung by them dies. Every person reacts differently to poison. Some people can die if they are stung by a bee. For others, a rattle snake bite doesn’t harm them at all. The age of the person and where they were stung all affects the time and the ability for the poison to work. If you were stung in the throat, the toxins would move very quickly through your blood to your heart & brain potentially killing you in minutes, which has happened.

Others are stung on the extremities & so the toxins take longer to get to the vital organs. So some people die very quickly while others stay alive for a considerable period of time.
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.

During certain times of the year, jellyfish can be found in the waters of Mauritius, and they can cause painful stings.
The highly venomous Box jellyfish is also occasionally found in the waters of Mauritius.
If you are stung by a jellyfish in Mauritius, seek medical attention immediately, especially if you were unable to identify the type of jellyfish. Call 114 for SAMU ambulance.
The National Coast Guard informs the public through the media whenever there are jellyfish sightings in lagoons. The french language Defimedia.info website is one of many news websites that inform the public.