Important safety note: If you go to Australia, don’t go swimming without proper training (and possibly a hazmat suit).
i believe the jellyfish i encountered were man o’ wars, or is it men o’ war, whatever, so they aren’t really jellyfish? how are they different???
It’s complicated and I don’t know enough biology to be able to boil it down for you, but there is reasonably complete information on Wikipedia.
why does everyone quote wikieffingpedia all the time? it’s far from an authority
It’s one study.
Because it cites its sources. If you find an unattributed assertion in a Wikipedia entry, you can ignore it.
And while it suffers from vandalism, it’s usually of the extremely obvious and easily reverted variety.
“The Portuguese man o’ boobs is a poopy wee wee butthole…”
On another topic probably worth its own thread, could somebody explain to me what makes a Portuguese man o’ war a colonial organism? I mean, I understand that they are considered 4 specialized zooids connected together functioning essentially as a single entity. Okay. But why do we classify each zooid as a separate organism rather than just as an organ of a single organism? It’s not like 4 zooids randomly meet together to form a new man o’ war–they all bud from the same structure and were all produced (as I understand it) from the same gametes.
Further complicating things is the fact that I’ve read (and totally understand) that colonial organisms are defined by the fact that each individual within the colony can survive on its own, while everything I’ve read about the Portuguese man o’ war suggests that each zooid is so dependent on the others that it cannot survive on its own. 
So what makes, say, a gonozooid different from a reproductive organ?
I was wondering the same thing.
The wiki link given above notes that the PMoW is a siphonophore. As such, it is apparently a shade of grey on a black/white spectrum with multicellular organisms at one end and colonial organisms at the other.
from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae
Because it’s concise, accessible to laymen, and at the right level of detail for most discussions like this. I’m not citing it as a source for a PhD thesis. Try this if you don’t care for that. Or try your luck with this(abstract only, charge for full article.) Or even do your own search.
just wanted to say well done:p
In regard to the Vinegar, at the beach at Port Douglas in far north Qld there are signs up warning people about swimming and bottles of while vinegar sitting in little pigeon holes next to the sign.
Just more proof that Australia is the most bizarre and evil of all continents.
Okay, I’m taking the “Swim with the Box Jellies Attraction” off my “Things to do when I visit Australia” list. And I don’t care what the Aussie tourist people say, I’m going to wear a pickelhaube there as protection against dropbears! 
There, fixed that for you.
isn’t there ONE stinkin’ doctor on this board who can tell me what happened?