Born on Apon a sheep station outside Charleville, Queensland, in 1942 Jack Handyside Barnes suspended his medical studies to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force and spent the war fighting the Japanese on the island of Timor. Unable to finger a definitive culprit, in 1952 Flecker grouped the symptoms together under the name “Irukandji Syndrome,” after an Aboriginal tribe native to the area of Northern Australia where the phenomenon was most common.įor nearly a decade the cause of Irukandji Syndrome remained a mystery, until in 1958 an eccentric doctor named Jack Barnes arrived in the northern town Cairns. While Flecker suspected that Type A Stingings were caused by some sort of jellyfish, he was unable to find any nematocysts – the syringe-like stinging cells jellyfish use to inject their venom – on any victims. Hugo Flecker, a pioneer of jellyfish research and the namesake of Chironex Fleckeri. Southcott’s research was taken up in the 1950s by Dr. But despite its ubiquity, the venom of the Box Jellyfish did not match the highly-specific symptoms of Type A Stingings – nor did any of the other ‘usual suspects’ like the Portuguese Man ’o War. These creatures have killed around 100 Australians since record-keeping began and seriously injured countless more, and fear of them regularly shuts down beaches for six months of the year across a 5000-kilometre stretch of Australia’s northern coast. And if that wasn’t enough, unlike regular jellyfish which are largely blind and drift passively with ocean currents, box jellyfish possess 24 surprisingly sophisticated eyes and can swim at speeds up to 3 knots. The venom they deliver is so potent that a mere two metres of tentacle can kill a grown man in under two minutes. Growing up to 30 centimetres wide with 60 tentacles four metres long, their nematocysts are among the fastest objects in the natural world and are powerful enough to penetrate the carapace of a crab. The Box Jellyfish is the bane of every Australian swimmer. Ronald Southcott, who in the 1940s dubbed the incidents “Type A Stingings” to distinguish them from the more well-known “Type B Stingings” inflicted by Chironex Fleckeri, the Australian Box Jellyfish. Among the first to study the phenomenon was Dr. If not, severe hypertension can lead to death from heart failure or cerebral haemorrhage.Īs more and more white Australians began living and vacationing in the area around the Great Barrier Reef, reports of this mysterious syndrome began trickling back to the medical community. If the victim is lucky, these systems persist for up to 24 hours before gradually fading away. “Patients believe they’re going to die and they’re so certain of it that they’ll actually beg their doctors to kill them just to get it over with.” It gives you this weird muscular restlessness so you can’t stop moving but every time you move it hurts.”Īnd if that weren’t enough, victims are also often struck with an overwhelming feeling of looming dread: It gives you very great difficulty in breathing where you just feel like you can’t catch your breath. It gives waves of full body cramps, profuse sweating … the nurses have to wring out the bed sheets every 15 minutes. How does vomiting every minute to two minutes for up to 12 hours sound? Incredible. It gives you relentless nausea and vomiting. “It gives you incredible lower back pain that you would think of as similar to an electric drill drilling into your back. As Australian biologist Lisa Gershwin explains: But ten to fifteen minutes later, they are suddenly struck down with a crippling combination of symptoms. At first, the victim feels only a mild burning sensation, no more painful than a bee sting. It is a creature so mysterious and elusive that up until 60 years ago, science didn’t even know it existed.įor thousands of years, the Aborigines of Australia’s northern coasts have known that to swim in the ocean between the months of November and May is to risk an ordeal painful beyond description. But one Aussie creature stands above the rest, its sting so painful its victims literally beg for death. From highly-venomous brown snakes and funnelweb spiders to giant saltwater crocodiles and great white sharks, nearly everything that slithers, crawls, or swims in the Land Down Under seems perfectly designed to inflict the most horrible death possible. Australia is infamous for its abundance of absurdly dangerous wildlife.
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