- 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 the bee, others a rattle snake bit seem to not harm them at all. The age of the person where they were stung all effect the time 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. And many have survived to tell the tale. Please refer to the link below Marine Medic.
- 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. A number have died in Thailand , S.E. Asia region.
- There are many species of Box Jellyfish around the world. Currently there are over 36 species known around the world. Some have still not been identified.
- Antivenom has been available for the last thirty years, but has to be administered quickly in order to be successful.
