HUNTINGTON BEACH : Rare, Poisonous Jellyfish Is Discovered Near City Pier

An unusual and potentially lethal type of jellyfish washed up near the city pier over the weekend, according to Golden West College biology professor Sharon Clark, who found the creature.

Clark said the jellyfish is “either a Portuguese man-of-war or one of its relatives.”

Such sea life has poisonous tentacles whose sting can sometimes be fatal, according to the California Fish and Game Department.

Positive identification of the species of the jellyfish has not been made, Clark said Monday. She noted that the creature she found is a baby jellyfish, which will be difficult to identify.

But she said it is poisonous and thus dangerous. “My advice is that if you see a jellyfish out there on the beach, don’t pick it up,” she said.

Paul Gregory, a marine biologist with the Long Beach office of the state Fish and Game Department, said Monday he knows of no other Portuguese man-of-war recently spotted in Southern California waters.

“It’s not a common thing” in Southern California, Gregory said. “That type of jellyfish usually is in the warm waters around the Equator. It probably came up in a warm-water period caused by the El Nino phenomenon.”

El Nino is a weather situation that causes unusually warm ocean waters.

Gregory said surfers should particularly beware of any “balloon-like things” they may see floating on the ocean. Those could be other poisonous jellyfish, Gregory said.

A full-grown Portuguese man-of-war has a blue-and-violet-colored floating bladder, about the size of a fist. It has tentacles several feet long. The baby jellyfish found by Clark has a bluish bladder about one-third the size of a fist and tentacles only a few inches long.

“I was walking just south of the pier on Sunday [about 3 p.m.] when I spotted it,” Clark said. “I’ve been to Florida and seen a Portuguese man-of-war, and that’s what I thought this was. But then I thought: ‘Hey, this is the Pacific!’ ”

Clark scooped the creature up in a discarded plastic cup and has kept it alive in seawater at the community college’s lab. She said some classes will see it this week.

As a photographer on Monday took shots of the jellyfish in a jar, several times it changed its size, shape and appearance. Clark agreed that the creature seemed almost alien-like science fiction.

“I used to be a real science-fiction fan,” Clark said. “Then I discovered that there are real things in biology that are much more strange and interesting than science fiction.”