Purple Stinger Jellyfish Pelagia noctiluca

The Purple Stinger Jellyfish, also called the Mauve Stinger and the Pink Jellyfish, is native to warm and temperate northeastern and northwestern Atlantic coasts.

Colour of the adults vary from whitish, pink, mauve, light purple, yellow or light brown, usually with darker pink or purple spots on the bell. The bell diameter is some 5-12cm and, unusually for jellyfish, it is covered in stingers as well as on the stinging tentacles which can reach well over a metre length. The shorter frilly tentacles and longer stringlike tentacles can give a painful sting.

They are bioluminescent, able to flash their light on and off. Huge aggregations drift on the current and occasional mass strandings can lead to closed beaches. Diet is zooplankton, various eggs and larvae, small crustaceans, cannibalisation of own young, warty comb jellies and, unusually for jellyfish, plant-based phytoplankton.

Like other jellyfish, they have a multiform life cycle, but unusually, they exclude the polyp stage, having only egg, planktonic larva, ephyra and medusa. Without the polyp stage, their only mode of reproduction is by male and female adults.