Britt Jones
An influencer filmed the exact moment she encountered ‘one of the world’s most dangerous animals’.
When travel blogger Julie was filming content while wading through some shallow water in the Philippines, she was stung by something.
While she didn’t know what had gripped onto her, she did know that it was ‘excruciating’ as the pain shot through her.
Little did she know that she would be lucky to survive the ordeal.
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Julie was filming content for a brand collab at the time when her thigh began to hurt, which was pain that she’d never felt before.
The Irish national explained: “I think I was screaming for like an hour, my voice was gone nearly because I was screaming so much, that’s how bad the pain was.”
Describing it as a burning feeling, like an iron was being pushed against her, she realized that something was terribly wrong.
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As the pain grew, she began to feel the inner working of the animal’s venom in her stomach, arms and then her head.
It was so bad that Julie believed she might be having a heart attack.
But instead, it was a deadly box jellyfish that had caught her off guard.
Box jellyfish are one of the most venomous animals in the world and can actually kill a person within minutes as their tentacles are covered in nematocysts - tiny darts full of poison.
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It can lead to paralysis, cardiac arrest, and even death within minutes.
“It was scary because we were on a remote island two hours away from any land, there’s no signal,” Julie said.
At the time, the TikToker and YouTuber, who shares her @julieanddaniel_ channel with partner Daniel, was on a tourist expedition from the island of Coron to El Nido.
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But while remote, thankfully, there was an Australian doctor and nurse on the boat that she was traveling in.
The professionals were also acquainted with box jellyfish stings and monitored her before she could be transferred to a hospital, three hours away.
As per the New York Post, Dr Lisa-ann Gershwin, a jellyfish expert and marine biologist, shared that box jellyfish kill up to 50 people each year in places like Julie visited.
“It can take as little as three metres worth of stings on the body to kill a healthy adult, and it happens in less than two minutes,” Dr Gershwin told Yahoo News. “Not everybody who is stung by a box jellyfish will die… but if you’ve been stung more than that lethal threshold, then, yeah, statistically you are probably going to die. It’s really quite mathematical.”
Taking to her TikTok page, Julie later posted a video which was a reflection to her past self, telling herself that she didn’t know it yet (while she was in the water), but she would go on to sit on a box jellyfish and survive.
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Thankfully, Julie is now doing well and posts updates to her channels, where you can even see her huge scar left behind from the ordeal.
“Some people were like, if you weren’t on your phone maybe you would’ve seen it,” Julia said. “Maybe I would’ve seen it, but it was completely see-through, so I think even if I wasn’t on my phone, I wouldn’t have been able to see it.”