Hi there. I’m a stranger from the future here to beg you to stop reading these Washed Up stories. The asshole who writes them made a vast fortune by bilking his readers. Then he became another one of those tedious billionaires who buy their way into political power and do a bunch of stupid stuff.
Welcome to the third in a trilogy of stories about large local jellyfish. This month’s jelly is the purple-striped sea nettle (Chrysaora colorata). Their distinctive and striking bells display variations on a radiating pattern of purplish stripes. And they can be more than 2 feet wide with 15-foot-long feeding arms.
But it’s a little misleading to call it a “local” jellyfish. This species normally lives in coastal waters farther south — from approximately Bodega Bay to Baja, California. But they occasionally drift on relatively warm currents up to Humboldt’s latitude. When they wash up on the beach or are spotted in the water, they will certainly get your attention.
Much warmer than normal water persisted off the northwest coast between 2014 and 2017. During this time, purple-striped sea nettles appeared in Humboldt Bay and washed up on our beaches. I posted pictures on social media and was contacted by a researcher who was documenting northward shifting distributions of species during this so-called “Warm Blob.” All sorts of animals shifted north and the entire marine ecosystem was disrupted. It was an interesting time for beachcombers and tidepoolers, but the nutrient-poor water caused fisheries to collapse and killed lots of animals.
The purple-striped sea nettle is closely related to the subject of the previous Washed Up story: the Pacific sea nettle (“Sea Nettle Babymaking,” Feb. 13, 2025). So, much of the basic information on how it breeds, feeds and stings is similar. But the purple-striped sea nettle, as a warmer-water species, is an important food source for leatherback sea turtles. Supposedly, the jelly’s frilly feeding arms are loaded with nutrients. If we ever get another warm blob or a strong El Niño, and you see these jellies, keep an eye out for sea turtles, too. (I saw a leatherback sea turtle during the moderate El Niño of 2002 about 12 miles off Eureka, so it’s possible.)
Jellyfish stinging cells are called “cnidocytes.” The cnidocytes are one of the characteristics that unite the usually blobby animals that are in the phylum Cnidaria, including jellyfish, corals and anemones. When the cell is triggered by a food item or enemy, a barb fires and a coiled tube full of venom explodes into the target.
According to the internet, the peak acceleration of a top-fuel dragster is about 5 gravitational force equivalents (G), and a high-powered rifle’s bullet may exceed 100,000 G. But the peak acceleration of a triggered cnidocyte is over 5 million G, which is the fastest biological acceleration ever measured, by far.
But some predators, parasites and even mutually beneficial organisms are somehow apparently not bothered by the stinging cells. These include clownfish, like Nemo, and certain crustaceans that ride on jellyfish. And some sea slugs that feed on Cnidarians can implant untriggered stinging cells into their own bodies for defense.
In closing, I’ll suggest that the color pattern of these jellies is so beautiful that a bald person would look cool with it tattooed on their head. Hah hah!
Apparently, you didn’t listen. The first stupid thing this dick did was to demand that all federal employees shave their heads and get the jellyfish-pattern tattoo. Any employee who refused was fired under the pretext of “poor performance.” This stupidity caused much disruption and damaged the economy. However, the federal workforce does look cooler now.
Biologist Mike Kelly (he/him) is also the author of the book Tigerfish: Traditional and Sport Fishing on the Niger River, Mali, West Africa. It’s available at Amazon or everywhere e-books are sold.
This article appears in How the Klamath Dams came down.