Ocean Watch

Monday, September 15, 1997

Jellyfish swarms are
not of their own doing

Do Hawaii's jellyfish swarm?

I received an E-mail earlier this summer from Pangolin Pictures in New York City. "We produce programming for National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, Audubon Society, etc.," wrote a company researcher. "Currently, we are working on a documentary film about SWARMS and would love to ask you a few questions about jellyfish."

I had never heard the term swarm used for these wind- and current-driven creatures. Unlike bees or locusts, jellyfish don't cruise in a crowd. Mostly, they're solitary individuals that occasionally become pushed together by wind and currents.

I enjoyed exchanging notes and phone calls with the people at this film company. They were pleasant, well informed and interested in getting the facts right. My only problem with their project was I didn't think Hawaii ever had what you'd call swarms of jellyfish, and I told them so.

Several days later, thousands of jellyfish arrived in Hawaii's bays and beaches, stinging a record number of swimmers.

For reasons unknown, on July 30, leeward beaches were inundated with box jellyfish. It was the worst invasion recorded here, so bad that lifeguards, police and volunteers walked the beaches with bullhorns, warning visitors in Japanese and English to stay out of the water. Even so, at least 800 people were stung.

The next day, Pangolin Pictures' Eric Taylor arrived in Hawaii to interview people about jellyfish. "I looked up the word swarm in the dictionary," he said. "I'm comfortable using the term with jellyfish here, especially after yesterday."

A swarm, Webster says, is (among other things) "a large number of animate or inanimate things massed together and usually in motion."

That pretty much describes what happened here in July with the box jellies. But it was interesting to me that not one of the local newspaper accounts I saw used the word swarm. Invasion, infestation and influx were the reporters' words of choice.

Why do I care about the word swarm? I'm uneasy with its tone. Maybe I saw too many horror movies when I was young, but to me, a swarm usually means hundreds or thousands of creatures moving with a single, sinister purpose: swarms of angry bees delivering stings; locusts moving over crops and devouring everything in sight; ants or flies swarming over dead bodies.

Jellyfish don't get together for that kind of organized carnage. The box jellies we see in Hawaii mostly drift with the currents, alone, trailing four stinging tentacles behind them to catch tiny pieces of food.

Hawaii's box jellyfish usually show up in leeward waters 8 to 10 days after a full moon.

When the numbers get large, all hell breaks loose, both for people, who get stung by trailing tentacles, and for the jellyfish, who die in droves on the beach. And even though the sting is accidental, the creatures become animal outlaws, reviled and feared.

I'm not saying their stings don't hurt and aren't sometimes severe enough for an ER visit. It's just that here in Hawaii, fear of a jellyfish sting doesn't justify permanently staying out of the water. In spite of all the talk about allergic reactions and so-called "shock" from stings, no deaths from jellyfish or Portuguese men-of-war have been reported in Hawaii.

Heed the lifeguards' calls and you'll rarely get stung. If you do, the burning sensation is usually short-lived.

OK, maybe thousands of jellyfish on one side of an island constitutes a swarm. But they don't mean to be bad. Jellyfish are victims of circumstance, just as we are when we connect with their tentacles.

Late this fall, look for "Deadly Swarms," a one-hour special on FOX television.