Lion’s Mane Jellyfish (Cyanea capillata) seem to be fairly common around Sitka. Sometimes they wash up on shore dead (which is how I usually find them), but this one was fun to watch as it moved up and down through the water column while slowly drifting on the current past Magic Island.
This jellyfish can give painful stings to humans, and I’ve heard about some kind of miserable seine hauls that were full of these (instead of the salmon they hoped for) with tentacles raining down on the hapless crew member assigned to stack the net (at least I think that’s the one that ended up in the tentacle shower – I’m not so familiar with seining operations and I may have misremembered).
