“Happy is he . . . whose hope is in the Lord his God: which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is.”
Psalm 146:56
Last week we looked at the design and habits of jellyfish found in oceans all over the world. We will describe a few of them.
The largest of all is the Cyanea Arctica, which measures 8 feet across its body and is armed with tentacles 200 feet long. These live in cold northern waters and are rarely seen.
Perhaps the most feared is the Portuguese man-of-war. It has 20 or more tentacles reaching down some 200 feet. It has a bright blue body and a gas-filled sail reaching above the surface for a means of travel with the wind. Its tentacles have enough poison to kill two dozen fish at a time and can prove fatal to a swimmer.
But there is another jellyfish more to be feared than the man-of-war. That is the sea wasp found off the north coast of Australia. It has a transparent, box-shaped, jet-propelled body and tentacles that also go deep into the ocean. It is perhaps the most deadly of all with an abundance of poison. This jellyfish kills more people each year than do sharks.
Another sky-blue variety is called “by-the-wind-sailor.” Like a miniature Portuguese man-of-war, it drifts with the wind and is sometimes stranded in great numbers on seashores. Its body is only two or three inches wide with short tentacles, which limit its catch to tiny fish or other small sea life.
The porpita jellyfish is medium sized with a dark-blue body and pale-blue, short tentacles that form a feathery-looking circle under its flat body. It also feeds only on tiny forms of marine life.
The physalla lives in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. It is a beautiful blue, or sometimes pink, with tentacles from 40 to 100 feet long and, like some of the others, can kill a man. Strangely though, a small fish named nemeus makes its home among the physalla’s deadly tentacles and even nibbles on them from time to time with no harm from the poison.
Most jellyfish are quite pretty, and a person not knowing the danger might be tempted to pick one out of the water but would soon regret it. This reminds us of Satan, the great deceiver, who likes to put hurtful temptations into our lives. How important to notice David’s prayer: “By the word of Thy lips I have [been kept] from the paths of the destroyer. Hold up my goings in Thy paths, that my footsteps slip not” (Psalm 17:45). As our opening verse states, happiness is found only when we rely on the Lord God to preserve us from Satan’s evil ways.
ML-06/25/2000