Rico says that Nature can be bad, too, as Luzette Alvarez points out in her article in The New York Times:
They swarmed the beach, taking control of prime holiday sand and surf like a group of marauding spring-breakers. Then, just like that, they vanished, leaving behind the damage: spoiled vacations, red welts, heaps of annoyance, discarded containers of vinegar and Benadryl, and a crew of exhausted lifeguards.
A flotilla of mauve stingers, a kind of jellyfish that summers mostly in the Mediterranean, staked a claim on ten miles of Florida beaches and stayed through Memorial Day weekend, finally pulling out of town on Wednesday. The stingers— reddish and small, some no bigger than a golf ball— coated just about every inch of these beaches, sending a steady stream of screeching beachgoers to the lifeguard stations, despite warnings to steer clear. Lifeguards treated 1,800 people for jellyfish stings last week. A few were sent to hospitals after suffering allergic reactions.
“It was by far the most jellyfish we have ever seen; you couldn’t even walk down the beach without being stung,” said Jeff Scabarozi, 30, the ocean rescue chief here. “People came out screaming and hollering that they had been stung. We haven’t seen these jellyfish ever. We had to Google it.”
Suddenly, surfers were donning full wetsuits in 79 degree surf. Tourists struggled to build sand castles with dry sand because the jellyfish had taken control of the wet sand. Convenience stories and pharmacies ran full out of Benadryl cream, which is used to neutralize the sting, along with vinegar.
Lifeguards warned people to stay out of the water and avoid the wet sand where the jellyfish, which are plastered with stingers and have long tentacles, stood guard; a vast majority of beachgoers, including many who were in town waiting to leave on cruises, heeded the advice. But, with the sweltering weather and the cool surf beckoning only steps away, a few vacationers were intent on getting their money’s worth. “We can’t tell people not to go in the water,” Mr. Scabarozi said regretfully. “Some people just want to go in the water.”
A few men dared one another to wade in. They did, and then sprinted directly to the lifeguard stands. Kids being kids, they scooped up the irresistibly squishy jellyfish and flung them at one another. Ouch. Some tourists guessed that the decorative creatures were perhaps an everyday occurrence, like a sand dollar or a sea shell. “It was almost comical,” said Bret Johnson, a lifeguard who was on duty over the weekend.
The sting of the mauve stinger is not as potent as that of the blue Portuguese man-of-war, which is Florida’s more typical beach scourge. Not quite a jellyfish, the man-of-war certainly behaves like one. Biologists say jellyfish are flourishing in warmer ocean waters and are washing up more frequently on to beaches.
After spending days of her vacation staring with frustration at an ocean she could not touch, Christina Sasdelli finally dipped into the warm Atlantic here on Tuesday. Her more valiant husband, Alan, stepped into the surf on Saturday to collect a bucket full of water for their toddler, who was displeased about the lack of access to the roaring surf. A tentacle wrapped around his foot. “It didn’t hurt much; an irritation,” he said, shrugging it off. The sting is akin to a bee’s. “We came from New Jersey to get in the water, and I wasn’t going to be denied,” he said. The couple celebrated their seventh anniversary by the pool and inside the Indian Creek waterway mostly. On Thursday, they head home to Vineland, with memories of the vast spongy jellyfish carpet that greeted their arrival. “There were thousands of them,” Ms. Sasdelli said. “There was no clear water. It was just little dots, small little dots, everywhere you looked.”
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