Mark Vins, doing something you shouldn’t do. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
In mid-August, I spent a quiet week in Mexico. It was a pretty normal Mexico vacation for me — mostly just a lot of reading, a lot of mezcal, a bit of spearfishing, and a bit of surfing. Like many times before, I ran into a few jellyfish while trying to shoot a fish. A jellyfish sting here and there is pretty common, so I didn’t think too much about it and just wiped my forearm off and continued to not shoot any fish, which is also pretty common. But by the next day, it was clear that whatever stung me wasn’t whatever I’m normally stung by. Three days later, and my arms and ribs and back were full of blistering sores that felt a little bit like stinging nettle or poison ivy, only… hotter.
That’s the best way I can describe it. Burning, itching, weeping sores. It was gross. Near the end of the trip, I went for a swim in a hotel pool, and was acutely aware of the fact that people were staring at me as though I were a leper. Which made sense, because I certainly looked like one. Anyway, the numbers of people who saw pictures of the stings and asked me whether I peed on them was high. I did, of course, look into whether peeing on a jellyfish sting was actually the right thing to do, and it is not. Sorry, perverts.
My arm, a few days after a run in with an unknown type of jellyfish.
What you are supposed to do (according to the Mayo Clinic, anyway) is remove any visible tentacles with tweezers, then soak the stings in hot water before applying 0.5 percent to 1 percent hydrocortisone cream. You’re not supposed to pee on them, rinse them with cold fresh water, rub them with a towel, or scratch them mercilessly in your sleep until you wake up with bloody sheets. The last one is my own recommendation, but it’s a good one.
In this video, Mark Vins from Brave Wilderness, a YouTube channel devoted to getting bitten or stung by some of the world’s most painful biters and stingers, decided he’d sting himself with a Portuguese Man O’ War in two places on the same arm, then test out two of the most popular the home remedies, piss and vinegar, to see which one was better.
His answer? The vinegar worked better than the urine. “Not only is the urine site absolutely disgusting, but it definitely burns a little worse. I can definitely feel a distinction between the two.”
It should be noted here that the jury is decidedly out when it comes to the helpfulness of vinegar. While some places claim it can help break down the toxins, others warn against it. The Red Cross is in the latter camp. “Vinegar (acetic acid) was confirmed to result in discharge of the stinging organelles of some species of jellyfish,” wrote the Red Cross on its website, “and is, therefore, no longer recommended in the majority of jellyfish stings in U.S. coastal waters.”
