Thousands of jellyfish wash up on California beaches

Video has surfaced showing thousands of dead jellyfish on a San Francisco beach this past Memorial Day.

Numerous jellyfish covered Pacifica Beach’s shore Monday which seemed to outnumber the amount of people. These particular type of jellyfish are called Scrippsia Pacifica. And local jellyfish expert, Steven Haddock says this outbreak isn’t that unusual. “These things tend to happen on a decadal time scale, where there will be 5 years where you don’t really see them… and 5 years where you see them again. So people tend to forget during that intervening 5 years that that they are out there.”

Spring is one of the times of year that you can find jellyfish all over the beach. Asilomar state beach had several jellyfish along the beach today.

“Sometimes we don’t know if they are alive or dead so we don’t touch them,” says Antonio. Antonio and Andres are visiting from New Mexico. They don’t get to see sea life like this that often and neither does their dad. He’s not used to the colder weather so he buried himself in the sand to stay warm.

I also went looking for jellies in Moss Landing with Haddock. “It would normally have a little fringe of tentacles around the outside, and some little red spots along the margin,” says Haddock.3

And they’ve had reports of jellyfish all up and down the California coast.

“We’ve gotten reports of north of San Francisco down to here. Down in Monterey essentially. Uhm, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they are down in San Luis Obispo or Pismo Beach.”

To answer questions like: how far these jellyfish are extending along the coast, and what type of jellyfish are out along the coast now… visit following the link to a jelly watch site.

http://jellywatch.org/