Length Is Associated with Pain: Jellyfish with Painful Sting Have Longer Nematocyst Tubules than Harmless Jellyfish

A large number of humans are stung by jellyfish all over the world. The stings cause acute pain followed by persistent pain and local inflammation. Harmful jellyfish species typically cause strong pain, whereas harmless jellyfish cause subtle or no pain. Jellyfish sting humans by injecting a tubule, contained in the nematocyst, the stinging organ of jellyfish. The tubule penetrates into the skin leading to venom injection. The detailed morphology of the nematocyst tubule and molecular structure of the venom in the nematocyst has been reported; however, the mechanism responsible for the difference in pain that is caused by harmful and harmless jellyfish sting has not yet been explored or explained. Therefore, we hypothesized that differences in the length of the nematocyst tubule leads to different degrees of epithelial damage. The initial acute pain might be generated by penetration of the tubule, which stimulates pain receptor neurons, whilst persistent pain might be caused by injection of venom into the epithelium. To test this hypothesis we compared the lengths of discharged nematocyst tubules from harmful and harmless jellyfish species and evaluated their ability to penetrate human skin. The results showed that the harmful jellyfish species, Chrysaora pacifica, Carybdea brevipedalia, and Chironex yamaguchii, causing moderate to severe pain, have nematocyst tubules longer than 200 μm, compared with a jellyfish species that cause little or no pain, Aurelia aurita. The majority of the tubules of harmful jellyfishes, C. yamaguchii and C. brevipedalia, were sufficiently long to penetrate the human epidermis and physically stimulate the free nerve endings of Aδ pain receptor fibers around plexuses to cause acute pain and inject the venom into the human skin epithelium to cause persistent pain and inflammation.