Scary Wednesday - Irukandji

If you are small and live in the ocean you're pretty much fucked. There will be sharks, turtles, nosy divers, black smokers, moray eels and outboard motors everywhere just waiting to eat, poke and slice you into a million pieces. So you need something special to be successful, a gimmick if you will. Like Britney Spears who is s a pretty sucky singer, but compensate by not wearing knickers.

The Irukandji (Carukia Barnesi) is a jellyfish that's very small, very fragile and almost invisible as it swims in the ocean.

 most venomous creature in the world

So it need something better than an absence of underwear to make it. And it has, and that is, as always; poison. Extremely potent poison, designed to catch fast moving fish and kill then in a heartbeat.
When you get stung by and Irukandji you initially just feel a mild pain that you will have no idea where it came from because the Irukandji is a little transparent devil far from the big hairy spider we featured last week.  After an hour or so you start vomiting. Am I seasick? You ask yourself. Well, maybe you are but it wouldn't help if you where Captain Haddock himself, you would still empty yourself all over the Fraser Island coastline, making local birds pretty happy and local divers pretty miserable.
If you have the good luck to be close to the boat and be driven to hospital you will probably survive, although you will spend a week wishing you didn't. As the doctors pumps as much weapons-grade morphine straight into you veins as possible, you will still experience the worst pain you have ever felt. People are known to have asked their doctors to kill them to get over it.  Yes, really
In the television show Super Animal a women says this:
""It's like when you're in labor, having a baby, and you've reached the peak of a contraction—that absolute peak—and you feel like you just can't do it anymore. That's the minimum that [Irukandji] pain is at, and it just builds from there."

It's called; the Irukandji Syndrome.
It's a lovely little state where you vomit, sweat profusely, cramp, kidney pain, burning skin, massive headaches, feel very agitated, you have a very high blood pressure and you heart pumps like it's trying to escape your body. Basically like Shane Macgowan feels every morning. But this lasts for days and days.

most hungover creature in the world

Very little is known about the Irukandji, partly because is nearly invisible, partly because it's very hard to handle. You can't even keep it in an aquarium cause it will break apart if it even touches the wall. It's not the rhinoceros of the seas, exactly.
What we do know is that it lives around Fraser Island north of Australia, they are related to other box jellyfish and they kill everything that touches it so they are probably lonelier than Mike Tyson.

When it stings the stingers that cover both it's tentacles and bell uncoils and millions of minute poisonous stingers (nematocysts) that travels in through you skin and releasing poison all the way through, even from the tips deeply imbedded in your flesh. Like you're gulliver but instead of ending up on the beach you find youself in a container of the Lilliputs discarded hypodermic needles. They also break off the Irukandji and continue to pump poison even after the initial contact is over. Bastard...

Oh, and there is no antidote.

Links
timsaxon
Youtube
Official Site
Discovery Channel - Killer Jellyfish