The potentially harmful Portuguese man-of-war has been reappearing at the Jersey Shore in recent weeks.
One beachgoer, Christine Perna Burns, attracted the attention of researchers on Friday when she posted a picture of the potentially deadly animal on the Wildwood Crest beach.
Paul Bologna of Montclair State University acknowledged that man-of-war have appeared in Cape May and Wildwood over the last few weeks. He also confirmed that the animal photographed by Burns is indeed a man-of-war.
Usually, by the time they wash up on the beach they are roughed up in the surf, Bologna said.
People can die typically if they encounter them in the wild, where they can get tangled up and repeatedly stung by tentacles that can be up to 100 feet long, Bologna said on Montclair University’s website.
By the time they wash up on beaches, they’ve been bounced around and their tentacles are often torn up, he said. But it’s still possibly to get stung by one, and get hurt – even the tentacles of a dead man-of-war can still sting you.
It’s not totally uncommon to see men-of-war appear on Jersey Shore beaches. In recent years, they’ve appeared on Long Beach Island, in Ventnor, as well as Monmouth County beaches, Bologna said on Montclair University’s website.
Bologna has said the animals typically wash up on Florida beaches in the spring and then truck up north via the Gulfstream, the powerful current that runs from the tropics to the North Atlantic. They may even show up on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod.
The Portuguese man-of-war is not a jellyfish, he said; they are actually siphonophores, which are colonies of cloned individual organisms working in unison to perform specific functions, like stinging, digestion and reproduction.
They deliver a toxic cocktail of neurotoxins and sedatives. The sedatives stun their prey and the neurotoxins kill them – so they are able to kill fish and eat them.
Photo courtesy of Christine Perna Burns
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