Yes jellyfish can sting when they’re dead, says Peter Richardson, and it\u2019s down to the fact that a jellyfish\u2019s body is about 95% water. <\/p>\n
Most jellyfish<\/a> have tentacles covered in thousands of tiny nematocyst cells<\/a>, each of which houses a bladder of toxins and a coiled \u2018harpoon\u2019 ready to fire when the surface comes under pressure.<\/p>\n If prey or an unfortunate human comes into contact with the tentacles, the surface of each cell floods with water, causing it to burst open and the weapon to launch.<\/p>\n When stranded on a beach and exposed to the wind and sun, jellyfish dehydrate, so don\u2019t survive for long. However, if the tentacles are still damp, the batteries of tiny harpoons remain a painful hazard. So, look but don\u2019t touch.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yes jellyfish can sting when they’re dead, says Peter Richardson, and it\u2019s down to the fact that a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":784657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-784656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/784657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}