Swimming in Goa with Jellyfish

If you ever go out on a boat in Goa even a kilometre out to sea, the odds are that you’ll pass schools of jellyfish with tentacles that trail back some 5 meters. The thought of encountering a roaming gang of poisonous molluscs like this is pretty terrifying and keeps many swimmers close to the shore.

But sometimes the jellyfish wash in and then the tide leaves them to burn up in the sand. People get too afraid to go into the water and those that get stung are encouraged to variously rub the wound with lemon, a kind of wild cucumber or else to piss on it – kind of tricky if you get stung on your back.

The worst part then is the paranoia when you do find the nerve to return to the water a few days later and every piece of seaweed that your arm encounters is of course the worst jellyfish you ever encountered. The jellyfish also often leave behind fragments of tentacles (or maybe they’re sea lice) that give the tiniest of nips but enough to convince you that you’re a second away from being throttled by a 5ft tentacle.

Luckily there are turtles who are said to eat up to 100 jellyfish a day and they keep the population of stinging jellies of red, green and blue at bay. Leave it to mankind to find a way to disrupt even the happiest natural balances though – although turtles are now protected and it’s a crime to hunt them, they’re unable to tell the difference between a plastic bag and a jellyfish. The average Goan solution to trash being to just toss it in a bush, the turtles have been dying in record numbers as their stomachs get clogged up with plastic bags that end up in the sea and estuaries.