Chris Collins told CNN that he and his wife Kari were on a night cruise on their boat on October 28 when they saw the jellyfish in a stream a good distance from the ocean.
“When we first saw it, I thought it might be a sea turtle or a large ray, so we turned around to get a better look,” said Collins. “As soon as we saw that it was a jellyfish that we were not familiar with, we wanted to take some pictures to share to see if anyone could help identify it.”
The couple had never seen a jellyfish like that before, so they posted the photos on Facebook and then sent them to SCDNR for identification.
Team members identified him as an Australian jellyfish, spokeswoman Erin Weeks told CNN.
She said that they can be a danger to fishing gear and boats due to their size and the volume of jellyfish that appear on flowers. They can get stuck in the boats’ water intake lines and overload the fishing nets when they are collected.
NAS program director Wesley M. Daniel told CNN that he couldn’t tell how big this jellyfish was because there is nothing in the photo to compare it.
There have been reports of half a dozen Australian jellyfish in South Carolina in the past two weeks, and there is very likely to be much more in the area, said Daniel.
“Most of the sightings are individual jellyfish that have reached the coast,” said Daniel. “An established population of spotted jellyfish in Australia occurs in the waters east of the Mississippi River, in the northern Gulf of Mexico. We do not know the situation of the South Carolina population at this time.”
They were spotted in the Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast, from Florida to North Carolina, according to NAS.
Weeks said this is the first time this species has been seen at Murrells Inlet, but it has been reported in South Carolina waters before – including a flowering in 2017 that was confirmed at Port Royal Sound, near Hilton Head.
“Australian jellyfish are believed to have been introduced globally through sea traffic (it goes through a polyp stage that can attach to ship hulls, gas platforms, etc.),” said Weeks by e- mail.
Weeks said the sting of Australian jellyfish ranges from mild to inconspicuous, but he said getting it out of a fishing net could be challenging.