- The coiled neis that cover the body of the Zora kin SRA have just been triggered unfurling.

They have injected caustic fluid into the skin of that child raising welts and causing a sudden chemical burn.

He has just been stung by a jellyfish.

It happens scores of times a day along these beaches from mid-June until the water becomes too cold for swimming in the fall.

But though the jellyfish is all too common, not much has been known about them, their lives and their habits until recently.

Join us as we learn from doctors Dorothy Spangenberg and David Feigenbaum, two scientists who are investigating this little monster of the sea and others like them.

The Zora Kin SRA is one of the five jellyfish types you're likely to see in the Chesapeake Bay.

It is the most venomous with stingers on all parts of its body, especially on its 24 long tentacles.

The pulsing dome propels the nettle and sweeps a flow of food laden water toward the tentacles where prey is stung, ensnared and passed inward to the mouth on the underside, sometimes called a blood sucker.

This more colorful version of the sea nettle is just like its white cousin except for the red color.

What purpose or significance the color has?

Nobody knows The moon jelly grows as large as a dinner platter, but the bay version is only faintly poisonous.

The clover leaf contains the sex organs.

The white or pink leafed male looses his sperm into the sea where it is drawn into the body of the female whose egg filled clover leaf is olive colored or dusty.

The comb jelly sea, walnut or pho often seen glowing luminous at night in the wake of boats is not a true jellyfish.

Its body is designed differently and it enjoys a different lifecycle.

It is a primitive cord date containing soft whispers of a spinal column.

This winter jelly or lion's mane preserved in Formin.

In the Old Dominion University.

Oceanography lab is cousin to the stinging nettle, but with a wider body and short bundles of poisonous tentacles.

It has its heyday between December and May, so it's weeks stings seldom bothers swimmers.

The mushroom cap, one of the prettiest linter rates is without stingers, but its thick body may reach a foot or more in diameter.

Many a swimmer who feels the solid lump of this fellow wash against him heads for shore and asks questions later.

Like other bei jellyfish, its ranges from New England to Florida and along the Gulf Coast.

Those thickly ruffled legs of the mushroom cap capture food and move it upward into the body.

The pulsing dome like a beating heart, circulates digested food to all parts of the animal.

In this lab at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Dr.

Dorothy Spangenberg grows jellyfish a developmental biologist.

Dr.

Spangenberg studies the mechanisms of growth and differentiation, which are similar in all living things, a jellyfish polyp, an embryonic human or a cancer tumor.

If the workings of one creature were fully understood, it's healthy normal development or what makes it develop deformities, we'd be far closer to understanding the processes that shape all living things.

Dr.

Spangenberg studies jellyfish the way someone researching genetic studies, fruit flies or a nutritionist studies rats because the jellyfish is easy to keep in quantities and it works out its problems quickly and visibly.

Dr.

Spangenberg has jellyfish polyps in the hundreds and some of her polyps are more than 50 years old when a polyp builds a row of segments that look like buttons and pops them off into the sea to become tiny jellyfish, the process is called stro.

Dr.

Spangenberg has discovered which chemicals, iodine and thyroxin she can add to the sea water around her polyps to make them reproduce.

And she has discovered other chemicals that can cause strange patterns of growth.

She has studied the stinging cells of jellyfish.

They are called neis, though she doesn't know how to disarm them, she has important thoughts on how further study of NEIS could be carried out.

- Yeah, this is the Medusa stage of the moon jelly, which is found abundantly in the Chesapeake Bay as well as the sea net.

And while the Medusa form has a different shape than the sea net, the life stage is and the life history is very similar.

The Medusa produced in the summer to give rise to an embryo, which is called a planula larva, which is a small ball of cells with Celia that most people notice that at the end of the summer the Medusa disappear.

And we have a theory based on our laboratory research that when the sexual products are released during reproduction, the gastric filaments or the digestive elements are lost as well.

And the jellyfish then are not able to digest their food and they starve and gradually reduce in size and break apart.

The planula larva settles, develops a stalk and a foot and sticks to objects such as the underside of shells and to pilings and various things in the water and grow into a sima or a polyp, which I prefer to call a polyp.

Now the polyp over winters in the water and is present until the springtime when it begins to undergo Strobel and it be segments and each segment then metamorphosis into then a fire.

Now the a fiery then feed voraciously and grow rapidly because there the size of a pen head in the springtime.

And by July most people know that they are of considerable size when they become a Medusa.

The whole life cycle has been described in textbooks as an alternation of generation, but in fact it is not a complete alternation of generation because the little polyp portion at the base of a stro can regenerate and go back to a polyp stage grow in bud and, and in fact, it is capable of undergoing Strobel ocean several times in one summer.

A unique feature of the jellyfish are the presence of large numbers of pneumatics, which are so small that they must be viewed through a high powered microscope.

Neis are what's responsible for the sting of the jellyfish.

They are organelles actually, which are formed inside jellyfish cells.

They are covered by a capsule and they have a thread inside, which is like coiled spring so that when the organism brushes up against an object such as a person or a fish or whatever, the spring is uncoiled and the thread explodes out with considerable force and penetrates the prey.

There are many kinds of pneumatics in the various types of linter rates.

The jellyfish Medusa of auria have two types.

They're called atrius, eyes arises and micro basic ele.

The sea nettle, however, has three types and the additional type is called a holo Trius eyes arises and maybe this is theoretically a possibility.

They may be responsible for the more severe sting of the cena.

The pneumatics could be the key to jellyfish control in that if one were able to prevent the jellyfish from making the manis, it's quite possible then that the jellyfish could not sting, the jellyfish could not eat, and possibly the jellyfish could not live.

We are interested in learning how to grow jellyfish cells with Dr.

R in the genetics program.

And I are collaborating on methods of growing jellyfish cells.

And one of the cells we most want to grow is a nito side, which is the cell that makes neis.

If we can grow cells that can make neis, we can learn what interferes with the development of the neis.

We could learn what the NEIS is, what is necessary to make a neis, and consequently, we may ultimately be able to interfere with the growth and development of the neis, not only in the cells in culture, but in the organisms in nature.

- Though they are handy creatures for a scientist who wants to study the workings of development, growth, and adaptation.

Jellyfish above all are themselves specialized, successful animals who have been around for hundreds of millions of years and seem likely to be around for several million more.

How do jellyfish make their living?

Where do they fit into the scheme of things In the Chesapeake Bay, ODU oceanographer, David Feigenbaum.

- In order to understand the significance of the sea nettle in the Chesapeake Bay, we first have to understand the food chain itself in the bay, and especially the part that's of interest to man sea.

Thats when they're very abundant feed, have quite an appetite and feed voraciously.

And here's what happens.

It has a complicating effect, which we still don't quite understand and that's the reason that we're working on the project right now.

But the basic food chain starts with microscopic plant cells called phytoplankton, something like the diatoms I'm drawing here now.

These are microscopics.

These phytoplankton are then eaten by small animals called Copa pods.

This is the most abundant animal in the world and micro crustaceans, which are related to crabs and lobsters.

They exist in millions and millions of them and they're the basic animal of the sea.

And ideally the basic food chain, if it were very simple, would be phytoplankton copa pod onto small fish, something like this, small hungry little fish which need to eat lots of Copa pods in order to grow up.

And then of course, larger fish.

Juvenile stripe bass would be eaten then by larger stripe bass or sea bass or spart and croker, the kind of fish that people like to to eat.

The complicating factor is that the sea that the cone jellies come in and they're very efficient feeders on Copa pods.

Now these are the comb jellies.

The comb jellies are far more efficient feeding at Copa pods than the fish are because the fish feed visually and have to pick each one out individually and the comb jellies can just mucus everything up.

The sea nettles come in because they feed on the comb jellies, and in doing so, they free the copa pots to be available for the young fish.

The complicating part is that the sea nettles also feed on copa pots.

If there are no comb jellies around or perhaps simultaneously they will feed on the copa parts.

But we believe that data will show that the comb jellies are more efficient feeding on the Copa pots and eat far more copa pos than the CNAs do.

Because like the fish, the CNAs have to sting each apart individually and they're not that efficient in their feeding.

- Maybe we need these natural predators.

That may be the case.

It's too soon to tell for sure, but Dr.

Feigenbaum and his crew in the ODU oceanography lab are working for the second summer On the core question, they study the speed at which jellyfish and comb jellies eat.

Inspect the jellies during the process of digestion and study the relationship of the animals to plant material in the water.

But they don't lock themselves in their laboratory.

They take their investigation right to the home of their prey.

Here in the Lafayette River in Norfolk, they stalk their quarry to its natural habitat and they have no trouble catching in their net.

A plentiful supply rolling.

- We'll use this net to catch the Copa pods and sea nettles and comb jellies.

In our study, the flow meter, which I have in my hand, keeps track of the amount of water that's filtered by the net.

And the net itself is actually two nets, one within the other so that the outer mesh is very fine and catches the copa pods and the internet is coarser and will catch the sea nettles and comb jellies.

But because it's coarsed, the Copa pods will pass through that and be retained by the the outer net.

And that allows us therefore to sort the animals.

Otherwise the CNAs would capture everything that was in the bottle.

This is another very important piece of equipment for our study called an NIO Water bottle.

We send it down in a position that's cocked open like this on the line, and therefore it's an open cylinder.

So when it goes down to the position, the level in the water that we want it to be, we have a steel messenger, which we put on the line and we send it down.

And when that messenger hits, it cocks the closes, the bottle springs the trap, and we capture the water and bring it back to the surface.

In our case, we're going to use that to study the plant cells in the water, the phytoplankton, but it could also be used to analyze for nutrients, pollutants, any other chemicals that we wanted to - Dr.

Feigenbaum and two graduate students twice a week from April to September take measurements of the sea nettle and of its habitat.

Until now, not much has been known about what jellyfish eat and how much they eat or what eats them.

Unfortunately, nothing in the bay eats the nettle at four stations along the Lafayette and Elizabeth Rivers, the ODU research team measures the quantities of microscopic plants and animals, comb and moon jellies and sea nettles.

The team records the time and temperatures.

- There's a nice one - In busy Hampton Roads.

Feigenbaum and his crew have to work fast.

- Flo Meter 9 6 1 6 5 8.

This is to 11?

Yes.

Time - One, one.

I got it.

- 9 5 9 9 53 weight's.

Okay, hold it.

Let the weight down.

Ready?

Go.

Let it go.

Can we push Push down on the bottle a little bit?

Out about a lot of Tina fors at this station.

A lot of Tina fors at this station.

There's your 50 anyway, it's too far out.

Mike - Speed, right?

Yeah.

Insight - Flow meter.

Okay.

Flow meter 9 6 2 7 1 5.

Keep an eye on the aircraft carrier.

Can you coming?

Yeah.

Okay.

Doesn't, not as much as before.

You figured that out.

There's nothing in here at all.

That is some Tina forests.

How everybody?

One lot of traffic today.

Lemme think at this station.

There you go.

Alright.

Some of these I numbered for the regular ones.

See, they're already labeled for later.

You have a Where's our, our marker.

Mike.

- Mike Kelly pours the sea water with the microscopic animals and plants through a mesh sieve and then washes out debris.

The animals and plant material will be frozen and taken to the lab for further analysis.

All of the figures, the quantities of jellyfish microscopic plants and animals will be correlated with the amount of water the flow meter measured.

- You need a bag?

We're not going it.

Okay.

See net three milliliters.

- Here's C four 90 milliliters.

New - Mop.

Okay, stuff this in the cooler.

We're ready for our water sample down there.

Down here.

Ready?

Send it down like slowly.

- Okay.

Then we'll put in, - Let's fill the bottle first, Kent.

- Okay.

- Okay.

Yeah, that's coming out good now.

Alright.

- Yep.

- Good.

- Go ahead and get a - With a syringe skin.

Che pulls up water with microscopic plant material.

Feigenbaum measures it with a refractometer.

- Still 11, actually it's 12 now.

- Having checked conditions in the deep water of the Elizabeth River, the investigators turned to look at a creek typical of those that fringe the Chesapeake Bay.

Sheltered waters are great for small boats and for breeding jellyfish.

- Last year, this was the station where we went deepest into the Lafayette.

It's the shallowest area where the water warms earliest in the season.

And it's the station where we saw the sea nettles first, perhaps about two weeks before we saw them at any other station.

And we always found more sea nettles at this station than any other in the Lafayette.

You can find similar reports in the literature for Sarah's Creek up by Gloucester point at Vims up in Maryland at Solomon's, the sea nettles always come first or emanate from the shallowest tributaries and creeks of the of the great Chesapeake system.

As long as there's some salinity, something like one seventh of normal seawater, salinity, you'll get sea nettles.

Man's activities have probably contributed to the sea nettle population.

As you see here, we have a manmade sea wall and lots of rocks and peer with pilings, all hard substrate, hard surfaces for the polyp stage to attach to.

And historically, sea nettles only attached to oyster shells and that limited the number that we could have had.

So there might very well be some truth to the fact that we seem to have more sea nettles now than anybody can remember in the past.

- From river sea walls to ocean beaches, the jellyfish are abundant in Tidewater.

Ernest a Morgan recalls a different time when he grew up on Norfolk's Ocean - View beach.

My family started coming to Ocean View just before the turn of the century, and my father built a home down here in 19 six.

So we'd have a place to go to the Jamestown Exposition.

Our home was about a half a block from the street court drive as a kid bathing, played a swimming or bathing as we called it, played a very prominent role in our day-to-day affairs.

My family would come to the beach about three 30 in the afternoon after the heat of the day had gone away.

And with the four kids, my grandmother would take us out and actually taught each of us to swim the stinging nettle.

Then came the latter part of August and probably stayed two weeks and then they were gone.

Bathing, as we called it, played a prominent part in Ocean View.

This beach would be filled from Memorial Day until Labor Day, all the way from s Constance Shrine to about where we are now.

There was swimming or bathing elsewhere on the beach, but most of it was right in this area.

We didn't have swimming pools then.

And I guess that played a role in how many people came here.

But I think the stinging nettles certainly have been a deterrent to people.

More people coming swimming.

I understand now that Old Dominion University and concert with the city of Norfolk is making some attempt to find a way to confine the state metals, or at least restrict them from bathing areas with nets.

And God knows, we hope it's successful because we'd like to see ocean view come back into its own.

Certainly it's during that building wise.

And we would like to see a steady flow of visitors from all over the world coming here.

It is a beautiful beach.

- Community beach at Ocean View is going to have a net system to keep away the sea nettles.

Dr.

Tony Provenzano of ODU explains to Feigenbaum how the net will work.

Okay, so this is - What we do.

Here's the beach.

We run a line of posts out about 75 feet down the beach, about another 75 feet.

And in we put a pole out in the corner with a couple of anchors on it, pole out in that corner.

Couple of anchors, and then we put a couple pilings in here.

These are temporary pilings now.

Okay.

They've got anchors to hold 'em on the ground.

Then we run the net all the way around the perimeter and up to the high tide mark.

Okay, now - This is use some, use some dead men.

- We're gonna have to use dead men to hold a net up here.

Put, bury him in the ground.

And then we use this as a temporary structure.

If it works this summer, if when we go back in, we can put in permanent pilings for the larger structure the next time around.

- Okay.

And we use about four different mesh sizes.

- Well, one of them will be set up with a fishnet type of stuff and the other one will be set up to test different kinds of materials that for fouling and how well they hold up against the currents and that sort of thing.

- And we sweep the inside air.

- Okay?

The the, the net structure will keep out the large jellyfish, small ones that get through or the baby ones that get inside and start to grow up.

We'll take out by putting, sweep the area inside here with special nets.

Remove the jellyfish from the swimming area so the kids can go in there.

We hope without any fear.

- Ocean view for the first time is going to have a net system to keep away the jellyfish.

But until the nets are installed, bathers should come prepared with vinegar, water or ammonia water to neutralize the nettles venom and paralyze the unexploded stinging cells.

Meat tenderizer applied to wet skin may help take away the sting.

The only other solution stay out of the water.