6-year-old stung by invasive clinging jellyfish in New Jersey river

Well, a warning if you are spending the weekend in the water in New Jersey, clinging jellyfish have been spotted in rivers and bays from Cape May to Sandy Hook. The jellyfish are hard to spot, but their sting can send you to the emergency room in some pretty severe pain. New Jersey reporter Tony Yates is in Manilow King as experts sound the alarm. Tony. All right, Liz and Joe, you know, this happens up on the Matita Conk River just a few miles up from where we are here in Manilow King. Now we spoke to an expert marine biologist who says this is the first clinging jellyfish bite in this state in several years. They were only just discovered in this state back in 2016. They're native to the Pacific Coast, but he says for some reason there was this huge explosion in clinging jellyfish populations this year here in New Jersey and unfortunately a sweet little girl, six year old Amelia became a victim Sunday morning. She's swimming out in the water like we always do, and she just started screaming. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. She's grabbing her chest as six year old Amelia's pain only worsened. This huge sting began appearing on her shoulder. We didn't see a bite. We didn't see a sting. But over the course of five hours, it became a well bruising, um, rash, and the pain was just not going away. Not knowing what caused this, Giuliana shifted into higher gear, doing her own research, finding Dr Paul Bologna of Montclair State University, the prominent local expert on clinging jellyfish, an invasive species in New Jersey. During the day, they're holding on to the algae and onto the grass, all that vegetation that's in the shallow water. So if you're walking from the beach into the shallow water, you're going to encounter if you're walking through that stuff, these guys are just holding on. And as you walk by, you kind of scare them or kind of disrupt them. And that's where somebody can end up getting stung. He took us into his lab where he and his team are studying these very tiny creatures. Gany anemous vertons whose stings are enormous. It just happened to wedge between her life vest and her body. And so it just kept rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, and that just fires all the stinging cells. They just keep going. Bam, bam, bam. The Colvins are sharing their story to make other families aware of the presence of the clinging jellyfish in many of our coastal waterways right now and to look out for the symptoms, especially if there's a little one complaining of any mysterious debilitating pain if they have been in the water. Took about four days for her to start feeling like herself and go back to school. She's doing much better now. Full recovery. Now again, those clinging jellyfish are usually found in the inner coastal waterways and the bays on the rivers as opposed to out on along the ocean because those crashing waves would just rip them apart. Now, the good news about this is that they hate the heat. So as the water warms up in these waterways, they will eventually die off, and that should happen within the next few weeks.