Man o' war sting nightmare
“My whole body felt as if it was burning” says bather
A YOUNG man from Pilar de la Horadada has told of how he was stung by the feared Portuguese man o’ war.
The incident occurred on Tuesday last week, as reported in Costa Blanca News.
The swimmer explained that he set out from Mil Palmeras beach with two friends and ‘was in the area near the buoys towards Campoamor’.
While in the water, he suddenly felt an increasing sensation of pain on his leg.
“I looked down and saw long tentacles around my leg,” he noted.
He soon felt ‘his legs and arms paralysing’ and decided to swim back to the shore for help because he knew he would not be able to reach his friends, who were now some distance away.
Fortunately, he is a proficient swimmer and a member of a local club.
His strength helped him to reach the shore, where beach workers phoned for an ambulance and local police.
He explained on social media that while he was waiting the pain was unbearable.
“My whole body felt as if it was burning,” he said.
“I was shaking all over and my legs and arms went stiff.”
Local police officers reached the beach and ordered swimmers out of the water.
When the paramedics arrived they started to remove some of the tentacles from his skin, although doctors in Torrevieja hospital completed the work. The swimmer highlighted that it took an hour for painkillers to take effect.
This helped him to relax and nurses applied a specific cream for burns, ‘which helped a lot’.
He spent the night under observation at the hospital and was told the following morning that he could go home.
The swimmer was advised to take painkillers, use the cream and stay away from the sun, ‘because the stings were similar to second-degree burns’.
Commenting on social media this week, he said that he ‘felt well’ but was ‘full of scars’.
He thanked the medical staff, local police, friends and family for their support.
Pilar de la Horadada town hall asked swimmers to be on the look-out and report any sightings of the man o’ war to lifeguards or call the 112 emergency hotline.
This is the second case of a swimmer being stung by a man o’ war on the south Costa Blanca in the last month.
On May 20 an 11-year-old boy had to be taken to Elche hospital after coming into contact with tentacles at La Marina beach.
According to the climatology lab at Alicante university, the Mediterranean is still cool for the time of year, which is allowing the man o’ war to survive.
Despite its appearance, the Portuguese man o’ war is not a true jellyfish but a siphonophore which is a colonial organism made up of specialized individual creatures of the same species.
However, like jellyfish they have no means of propulsion and move according to the winds, currents and tides.
The sea creature’s long tentacles can deliver a painful sting which on extremely rare occasions has proved to be fatal to humans.
It uses its tentacles to trap and paralyse its prey while reeling it inwards to digestive polyps.
Scientists note that they live in cold ocean waters and are rarely seen in the Mediterranean Sea.
They arrived this year after being swept from the Atlantic through the Gibraltar Strait by a succession of sea storms moving from west to east.