A couple believed they were on a “normal” kayaking trip, until they realized what was lurking just below their boat.
Megan Gilbert, 30, is a travel blogger, writer and photographer who shares her adventures to her blog, Megan The Traveling Writer.
Gilbert is originally from the United States, and now lives in Cape Town, South Africa—but as she told Newsweek, she spends most of the year traveling to different places.
Recently, Gilbert had an incredible experience with nature without having to travel too far, as what she assumed was “a normal kayaking trip” in Cape Town turned into an experience she described as “incredibly special and rare.”
“We’ve kayaked here before and saw penguins and dolphins,” Gilbert told Newsweek.
This time, however, they saw jellyfish—at first, she said, “we were excited to see one or two jellyfish, until we started seeing massive pods of them floating at the surface, called a ‘super bloom’.
“It looked like thousands.”
Jellyfish blooms is the term given to a substantial but temporary growth in the population of jellyfish, and are a natural phenomenon though in some cases can be exacerbated by human disruption to the environment, according to marine biologist Dr David Shiffman, writing for Scuba Diving Magazine.
“A ‘super bloom’ like this is rare,” Gilbert said. “All the kayaking guides said they’d never seen one like this before, but smaller blooms have happened this year in Cape Town.”
The couple and their guide attempted to kayak around the jellyfish, and while the guide warned the Starlight Jellyfish species stings, Gilbert took the opportunity to capture an underwater shot of the creatures when they came across a gap in the water.
“I had no idea how many there really were until I put my GoPro in the water,” she said. “When I checked my footage later, I was shocked. We were kayaking right above thousands of stinging jellyfish!”
She shared the footage to her Instagram account @meganthetravelingwriter on May 6, where it has racked up more than 1.4 million likes.
It began with Gilbert smiling on the kayak in what appeared to be clear, smooth water—but when she put the camera down, it revealed thousands of the stinging jellyfish floating just beneath the surface and into the deep beyond.
She joked: “Who wants to go swimming?”
Gilbert told Newsweek: “I’d never seen anything like this before. It was eerie, beautiful, and scary all at the same time.
Instagram commenters flocked to the post, one writing: “I freaked out on a kayak in the calm Mediterranean Sea when I saw one single jellyfish. I would meet my end this day by panicking, falling off the boat and getting stung!”
“I didn’t know I was afraid of jellyfish until I just saw this,” another admitted, as another said they would “shut down instantly” if they saw it—and plenty compared the stunning shot to a famous scene in Disney‘s Finding Nemo.
Gilbert returned the next evening to capture more footage, but says by that time “most of the jellyfish were gone because of the waves and Sunfish,” a foraging predator that eats jellyfish.
“Seeing the super bloom was over just showed me even more how wonderful the ocean is, and how unexpected,” she said. “You never know what’s down there and what you’ll see.”
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