To take arms against a sea of troubles

I went to the beach at Fire Island yesterday with a few friends. After a three-hour journey of multiple train interchanges and a ferry ride where loud old people passed around a jug of bloody mary, through the gauntlet of the little marina where the supertanned party with their blenders, we arrived at our narrow spit of grassy bluffs and open skies. It's a lovely, quiet beach where people mostly behave responsibly.

The water was calm and clean, and gets deep quite close to the shore, which means you can have a nice little swim right under the lifeguard's nose. This was of particular comfort after last week's sad rash of beach drownings. As we splashed down into that cool, jade green, the friend who had gone in first noted that she'd seen some jellyfish a few yards over. But the water looked clear, so we dove in, only somewhat warily.

After a few minutes, I did feel a sharp little sting on my leg. Since I never felt anything brush past me, and couldn't see jellyfish anywhere nearby, I thought I was just being paranoid. Then I felt another sting on my arm. Then my ribcage. The stinging was mild and left no marks, but it stuck around in a disconcerting way. The others were feeling it too.

A fat man with a wonderful mustache noticed our discomfort and confusion. He told us that from what he'd heard, there had been an infestation of purple jellyfish at this beach the day before. The wind and tides had swept most of them away, but left behind a lot of jellyfish eggs. "They call them lice," he told us.

"Now when you say 'lice,' and when you say 'jellyfish eggs,' do you mean that they're burrowing under our skin to reproduce by the thousands inside our bodies?" I asked. He sort of shrugged his shoulders. I took this to mean no, so we kept swimming. But eventually, too many spots on our torsos, legs, and arms bore these sharp little pangs, and we got worried. We left the water to go bask in the sun again like lazy harbor seals. (Lazy harbor seals with rigorous sunscreen application routines and a big bag of Doritos.)

We'd been so focused on checking the weather to plan our beach day that we had failed to keep up with world animal news. If we'd paid attention, we might have known that vast armies of jellyfish have recently been invading beaches all over the world.

Warmer sea temperatures, the overfishing of jellyfish's natural predators, and increased pollution have all led to this population explosion. Writing in the New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal calls jellyfish "the cockroaches of the open waters, the ultimate maritime survivors who thrive in damaged environments."

The stinging was gone after maybe fifteen minutes of sun-dozing, so we ventured back out into the water a little while later. Again that ecstasy of perfect ocean swimming tempered by the onslaught of mystery needlings. When I caught a nematocyst in the face, it was time to head to dry land for good. Just a couple hours later, I was contributing to the ocean's decline with a big plate of cod and chips. Sorry about that.