Red Tide/Black Jellyfish

Not only are we dealing with the red tide (see post below), but there also has been an invasion of a rare type of jellyfish:

“They’re all over the place,” Encinitas lifeguard Captain Larry Giles said Monday. “It’s sick. We’re getting so many jelly fish stings we can hardly keep up.”

Vincent Levesque, a scientist who actually breeds jellyfish at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Birch Aquarium, said San Diego County’s beaches are visited annually by one type of jelly fish —- the “purple striped” jellyfish —- that drift in with tides.

But he said this year the purple striped jellyfish have been joined by two other types: the “fried egg jellyfish” and an extremely rare black jellyfish —– a deeply purple plankton that can be as wide as three feet across and have tentacles stretching up to four feet in length.

The result for swimmers and lifeguards has been a pain.

The linked NC Times article has some nice photos.