The Deadliest Animal in the World

Do you know, it is one of deadliest creatures in the world? No, it’s not the cobra.
It is the sea wasp. It is a kind of jelly fish and is called the Chironex Fleckeri, commonly known as sea wasp.

It has a bell-shaped body with long tentacles that trail behind it. These tentacles have hundreds of thousands of tiny cells, which contain a cobra-like poison. When a victim brushes against the tentacles, the poison is injected into his body, killing him in less than five minutes.

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? It is scary. Because, medical science has not yet found an antidote or cure for it.

Ninety five per cent of the sea wasp’s body consists of water. So it is colourless. And, it can be very elusive. You can spot it in shallow tropical waters only if you look very carefully.

The size of a sea wasp varies from 4 cm to 20 cm across and 10 cm in length. It has purple or bluish tentacles which can be seen coming out of the bell-shaped body. These may reach up to a length of more than a metre. One wasp may have up to 50 tentacles. And one such tentacle may have as many as 750,000 stinging cells. The wasp uses these tentacles to get food and also to protect itself.

The sea wasp is found in the waters off the coast of northern Australia, in the waters off the Atlantic coast in the United States, in West Africa and in the Indian Ocean.

278 words | 2 minutes
Readability: Grade 6 (11-12 year old children)
Based on Flesch–Kincaid readability scores

Filed under: planet earth
Tags: #coast, #poison, #cobras, #tentacles

You may also be interested in these:
How Bad is the Sting of a Scorpion?
Earth Heroes
The Deadly King Cobra
Killing them Surely
Why are Some Reptiles Brightly Coloured?