It is an excellent natural history of jellyfish. But I read on, and it didn't take long before this thoroughly engaging book turned my old horror into wonderment, and by its end into something close to love and awe. I felt a faint echo of that childhood panic when I opened Spineless and read Juli Berwald's description of the first time she saw wild jellyfish – hundreds of thousands of them in a tidal stream in Hiroshima, moving past her in a seemingly endless flow of pink, pulsing life.
To me they were incomprehensible, alien things transparent matter that seemed only vaguely alive. I loved the natural world, but I couldn't see how jellyfish fit in it. My stomach turned and my skin prickled with a horror that was never just the fear of being stung.įrankly, jellyfish freaked me out.
Sometimes, swimming in the silty water of the North Sea off the Suffolk coast on my summer holidays, I felt the unmistakable, horrid sensation of my skin brushing against the smooth, gelatinous surface of a compass jellyfish or moon jelly. I lived in dread of jellyfish as a child.
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