The Hualien County Bureau of Agriculture on Thursday called for calm after photographs of multiple Portuguese man-of-wars at Cisingtan Beach (七星潭) went viral on Facebook.
The Portuguese man-of-war — also known as the “floating terror” — is a venomous creature consisting of four symbiotes that resembles a jellyfish. Its tentacles can reach 50m in length while in water and deliver a sting that can cause excruciating pain and sometimes death.
A picture of several dead Portuguese man-of-wars on the beach was on Wednesday posted to the Facebook group “People of Hualien” with a reminder that the creature was still dangerous if it is dead and should not be touched.
Photo: Screen grab from Facebook
The incident was likely an isolated event, as there has been no officially recognized sightings of the creatures in the past few days, fishery and animal husbandry section head Huang Yao-hsing (黃耀興) said on Thursday.
“However, we urge the public to never handle floating terrors,” he said.
Touching a man-of-war could result in painful red welts that take two to three days to heal, the East Coast National Scenic Area Administration said, confirming that even a dead floating man-of-war’s tentacles can sting hours after its death.
The creature’s toxins can spread to lymph nodes and cause symptoms similar to that of an allergic reaction, it said.
A member of the Hualien Marine Conservation Association surnamed Pan (潘) said that jellyfish and man-of-war populations have been increasing in waters near Hualien due to climate change and pollution from agricultural runoff.
Excessive nutrients in the form of salts and fertilizers can lead to blooms of algae and plankton, which are harmful to most ocean life, but beneficial to jellyfish and man-of-wars, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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