The high temperatures this weekend have filled the beaches with bathers, but also with jellyfish. In the last few hours, images of the beach in the Bay of Roses, on the Costa Brava, have gone viral due to the hundreds of jellyfish that were in the sand.
Several users have published photographs and videos of the large presence of jellyfish on the coast, which has meant that many bathers who were in Montjoi cove, next to Ferran Adrià's Bulli restaurant, were unable to get close to the water.
Experts warn that the drought and heat will make these types of episodes with hundreds of these animals filling the bathing area increasingly common. The researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences, Josep Maria Gili, explains to RAC1 that the lack of rain makes the state of the water on the coast very similar to what they would find in the open sea.
This type of jellyfish is called Pelagia noctiluca: they are transparent, with lilac or magenta spots and long, thin tentacles. They are usually on the high seas and Gili warns that they are a very stinging species. "It accounts for between 60 and 70% of bites on beaches, it is the most stinging of all."
These species, to a lesser extent, are also in summer, and are added to those on the coast, which we still cannot see with the naked eye, because it is precisely in spring when they reproduce.
Gili warns that the increase in temperatures and droughts caused by climate change will make the arrival of jellyfish to the coast more frequent.
