KAYAKERS DISCOVER A NEVER-ENDING SMACK OF JELLYFISH DIRECTLY BELOW THEM
In a scene from Finding Nemo, Marlin and Dory, the main characters, had to make their way across waters teeming with jellyfish. The pair is surrounded by the pink, bulbous animals that seem to go on forever across the ocean. The scene struck a chord with Megan Gilbert and her spouse while they were kayaking in Cape Town, South Africa.
As they were paddling, the couple noticed a few jellyfish floating in the water. At first, they were “excited” to see them, until they noticed “a few more” and, soon after, “whole patches of them.”
“They looked like they went down forever,” Gilbert told the Dodo.
Curious to find out how many jellyfish were circling beneath the kayak, Gilbert lowered her GoPro into the sea. When she returned home later that day and reviewed the footage, she was astonished by what she saw: hundreds of glowing, night-light jellyfish, eerily similar to those featured in Finding Nemo.
“When I finally checked the footage, I almost had a heart attack,” Gilbert continued. “I was shocked!”
Mauve stingers, another name for night-light jellyfish, are found worldwide in warm temperate and tropical waters. Even while they are usually not harmful, stinging episodes might happen frequently and cause pain.
Due to their limited swimming capacity, these specific jellyfish also frequently show up in big swarms, or "blooms," which are sometimes transported by the wind or current to locations where they might not otherwise be seen. This explains why there were so many people huddled under Gilbert's kayak: night-light jellies have been extremely common in Cape Town lately.
“It’s both beautiful and scary at the same time,” Gilbert said. “You never know what the ocean will have for you. It’s magical.”