1) Box Jellyfish
Image VIA
And the winner is… the box jellyfish; he is the number one poisonous bastard of the sea. It just floats gently around in lovely warm oceans, it’s almost transparent and very easy to miss. If you found yourself drifting into one, you would know about it soon enough though.
The box jellyfish has around 60 tentacles which stretch up to almost 10ft in length. Each tentacle has about 500,000 so-called cnidocytes which contain nematocysts – a harpoon-shaped microscopic mechanism that injects venom into its victim. Basically, you don’t want to get caught up in there at all.
Image VIA
Fatalities are most often perpetrated by the largest species of this class of jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri. Angel Yanagihara of the University of Hawaii’s Department of Tropical Medicine found the venom causes cells to become porous enough to allow potassium leakage which can lead to cardiovascular collapse and death within 2 to 5 minutes.
Brutal.
Well, I’m pretty pleased I live in the UK after all of that. We’ve only got the adder to worry about and I’ve never even seen one of those in the wild. Having said that, we do have quite a few poisonous plants that could do you a mischief if you were daft enough to eat them. I guess the moral of the story is avoid the ocean and anywhere warm, and plants, and snails. Then you should be OK.
