Rare ‘Pink Meanie’ Jellyfish Are Blooming Off the Coast of Texas

The large, vibrantly hued creatures can weigh up to 50 pounds and have tentacles up to 70 feet long

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

October 7, 2025

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Large “pink meanie” jellyfish are congregating along the coast of Texas, giving beachgoers a rare chance to observe these brightly colored creatures in the wild.

A pink meanie jellyfish (Drymonema larsoni) washed up on the beach in late September, according to a video created by Jace Tunnell, director of community engagement at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi’s Harte Research Institute. After that initial sighting, he wandered along the sand and found more than ten of the creatures.

“I even spotted one in a Port Aransas marina wrapped around a moon jellyfish (their favorite food),” he wrote in the video’s caption.

Pink meanies start off small as babies, but can grow to up to 50 pounds, according to Tunnell. Their tentacles can stretch up to 70 feet long.

In the water, pink meanies look like floating cotton candy, with a vibrant, rosy hue that gives them their name. On the sand, however, they tend to look more drab, which can make them difficult for beachgoers to identify. Once they wash ashore, birds and crabs tend to start feeding on them, so their bodies disappear relatively quickly.

The jellyfish primarily feed on other jellyfish, chowing down on moon jellyfish, a common, translucent species with short tentacles. They tend to go wherever the moon jellyfish go and gather late summer and early fall, according to the Dauphin Island Sea Lab.

“Whenever we have a lot of moon jellyfish, these will show up,” says Tunnell in the video. “When the moon jellies are there, these are eating on them. Once the moon jellies are gone, you’re not going to find them anymore.”

Pink meanies also tend to disappear from the Gulf Coast once temperatures start to drop in the fall.

“They’re not very common at all,” Mark Fisher, science director for the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department Coastal Fisheries Division, tells KSAT-TV’s Pachatta Pope. “We only see them in the warmer months; they don’t like cold at all.”

Pink meanies can sting—Tunnell even got stung by one while filming the video—but he notes that the pain is bearable.

“My fingers are actually starting to tingle a little bit now,” he says while holding one up off the sand. “The sting is probably a two, for me, out of ten, so not too bad.”

Scientists first spotted pink meanies in large numbers off the Florida Keys in 2000, as Ker Than reported for National Geographic in 2011. At the time, they thought the creatures were Drymonema dalmatinum, a species commonly found in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and off the Atlantic coast of South America.

But in 2011, after conducting genetic testing and further analyses, the researchers identified pink meanies as a new species. The jellyfish are so unusual that scientists also determined they represented a new family of jellyfish called Drymonematidae. Their scientific name, Drymonema larsoni, pays homage to Ron Larson, a biologist who conducted early research on the species in the Caribbean.

Today, pink meanies can be found along the Gulf Coast, in the Mediterranean and in the waters off South Africa, according to Tunnell.

“Although they may look tempting in the water with their cotton candy appearance, people do not eat pink meanies,” Tunnel writes in a column for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. “Instead, these jellyfish play their role in the environment by controlling populations of other jellyfish, especially the abundant moon jellies.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.