RobotBlogger

Brie and i took Crispin and Zoe to the Noosa beaches today. We had a grand time relaxing in the sunshine and did a little boogy boarding. We weren't alone. The ocean was full of Portuguese Man 'o Wars.

So here's my thinking. Ok, this is Australia, this is a very BLUE thing from the ocean, i bet it's dangerous.

I picked up two with the strap from my boogyboard and took them over to show Brianna and Zoe.

Deeply blue, strange and wonderfully bizarre creatures. They were all over the beach, everywhere.

Back at our beach umbrella, i took one of our empty water bottles, flushed it out and filled it with seawater. We put the little blue guys into the large mouthed water bottle. They were alive!

Now, people seem in contradiction about these blue monsters. Some websites say that they've never caused a human death, other websites say that they have. Some say to treat the sting with cold water, some say hot water! What everyone agrees about is what the stings are like: 'Excruciatingly painful'
'Exceedingly painful'
'Intense pain may be felt from a few minutes to many hours and develops into a dull ache which then spreads to surrounding joints'

Lovely. A beach littered with thousands of sudden intense pain contraptions, and nobody says a word.

Miraculously, these things aren't a single creature, they're a gang of different gizmos called zooids, all living and working together. The air sac / sail to help it float, a stomach thing, the deadly stinger strands which can grow to 10 meters long. Somehow they all get together and hit the seas in search of paralyzing small fish and other innocent sea creatures.

The air sac secretes a slime to neutralize the evil toxins of the stinger. This slime works very well, apparently, to neutralize stings. So if you get stung by rubbing against one, rub some other part of it then rub that on you to solve the problem. Sure!

A few times, every once and a while, someone will ask 'Have you ever seen a bear in Canada?' 'Oh yeah,' i tell them. 'A few times.. Had a run-in with one once and it was pretty scary, but they're basically just big and black and run away. Up north the Grizzlies are much worse, but you don't see them much.' By then the question asker has pretty big eyes and seems to be pretty surprised that, you know, we dare to go outside with bears hanging around.

Surprised about a handful of bears in the deep forest, when there's thousands of little blue torture landmine globs sprinkled all over the beaches - and that's just one of the many zillions of excessively potent death creatures lurking about.