Anyone who has ever been bitten by a jellyfish knows that it is annoying. Your skin swells, turns red, starts to itch like crazy and sometimes it hurts (all over your body). If you are allergic, in rare cases you can even go into anaphylactic shock. What makes a jellyfish bite so painful? And is there anything that can be done about it, such as peeing over the bite, as some people sometimes say?
The stinging cells of jellyfish contain poison
That contact with a jellyfish can hurt so much is because of the tentacles. On the outside of those strings are nettle cells. If the jellyfish comes into contact with an enemy, the stinging cells shoot out of the tentacle like a kind of harpoon. The poison from those cells ends up in your skin, causing itching and pain.
Fortunately, in the Netherlands, the chance of encountering a (very) poisonous jellyfish is not very high. Common jellyfish in the North Sea are the ear jellyfish and the compass jellyfish (pictured above). An encounter with the first gives you a lot of itching, an encounter with the second can cause you minor injuries and pain. But it usually doesn’t get really dangerous. The tentacles of the blue haired jellyfish, active from March to August, can also sting quite a bit.
Peeing all over yourself with a jellyfish bite
Most jellyfish species in Dutch waters may be harmless, but no one wants itching and pain either. What can you do about that? Popular is the idea of urinating over the bite. The ammonia in the urine is said to relieve the pain. Doesn’t sound so fresh does it?
Fortunately, that pee story with a jellyfish bite is nothing more than a sandwich monkey. But a well-known one. So well-known, in fact, that it was featured in the television series Friends was used. The character Monica Geller cries out in pain during a trip to the beach after a collision with a jellyfish. Joey Tribbiani then advises her to pee all over herself. he would do that The Discovery Channel have seen.
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Physician Nicholas Ward of the University of California, San Diego (USA) published in 2012 an investigation in which he compared 19 previous studies of jellyfish stings. He concluded that ammonia in urine only aggravates the pain. The fact that it helps to pee all over yourself after touching a jellyfish can therefore be relegated to the realm of fables.
Submerge your jellyfish bite in warm water
So what should you do if you get a jellyfish bite? Remove the nettle particles, for example with tweezers. Scraping with a bank card is also an option. The nettle particles excrete the poison, so the sooner you remove it, the better.
Then it is a matter of rinsing with warm water (about 45 degrees Celsius). That is present at the beach post. Is it too far away or not available? Then walk back into the salty sea. Both hot and salt water were found to be effective treatments for jellyfish stings in Ward’s comparison study. In any case, don’t use the cold, sweet water in your water bottle to rinse off your jellyfish bite. Fresh water reactivates the nettle cells, resulting in more pain.
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