Watch: Nature’s Beauty Or Nightmare Fuel? Three-Metre-Long ‘Barbed Wire Jellyfish’ Spotted Near Gozo
A long, rope-like jellyfish with names as ominous as its appearance has been spotted off the coast of Gozo.
In a video filmed by Lewis Mark Sell and shared by popular marine biologist Alan Deidun yesterday, the three-metre-long “barbed wire jellyfish” – which is also (hilariously yet terrifyingly) known as the “stringy, stingy, thingy” – was spotted in the depths of Malta’s sister island.
“It’s actually not a conventional jellyfish as we know it but yet another highly-stinging siphonophore species belonging to the same group as the Portuguese man ’o war,” Deidun explained of the large creature. “This colony, which can be found up to depths of 1000 metres and includes thousands of individual tentacled zooids, all of which are intent of paralysing any hapless small creature which comes their way.”
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Spotted close to Gozo, the barbed wire jellyfish was also described as “nature’s version of a long fishing line or drift net”… but thankfully, swimmers rarely have to worry about it. “Luckily, these are mainly recorded from Maltese waters in spring,” Deidun had said last May, when yet another terrifying specimen had been photographed.
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