An Australian teenager has been forced to spend Christmas in the hospital after swallowing a bluebottle jellyfish while holidaying at the beach.
According to 7News, paramedics who treated the 18-year-old at the scene were unsure of how the bizarre incident occurred.
"New South Wales Ambulance paramedics were called to Bondi Beach Surf Life Saving Club at around 1:20 PM yesterday, to reports that a teenage male had swallowed a bluebottle [sic]," a spokesperson for New South Wales Ambulance stated.
"There is not a record of his condition or how he came to ingest the jellyfish," they continued, adding that the teen had been admitted to St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney soon after the incident.
One in six Australians have been stung by a jellyfish such as a bluebottle, but only a handful of those incidents have been fatal, per Science Direct.
Also known as the Pacific man-of-war, bluebottle jellyfish are most common on exposed ocean beaches after strong winds wash them ashore and are rarely found in sheltered waters.
Jellyfish are not known to be affected by water temperatures, according to research from UNSW, however "beaching events" - when vast numbers of jellyfish are seen on the shore - tend to occur most often in the summer months.
Roughly 10-30,000 stings from the jellyfish are reported each year along Australia's east coast, the Australian Museum details.
They float on the surface of the ocean, being steered by the winds with their gas-filled sacs. As such, it is widely unknown how they end up on Australian shores.
BluebottleWatch, a research project in collaboration with the government, universities, and Surf Life Saving Australia is working to predict when the jellyfish will be around beaches in Sydney, by deploying bluebottle-shaped drifters within bluebottle groups - known as armadas - and tracking their GPS location.
Fatalities from the jellyfish are rare, however symptoms can include shortness of breath and other allergy-like symptoms.
