The Chironex fleckeri. A brutish, malevolent creature the size of a birthday cake with sixty sting-encrusted tentacles. The Chironex, a type of box jellyfish, has killed at least 67 people in Australia since records began in 1883, more than the notorious red-back spider. It can exterminate a grown man in 3 minutes flat. Jamie Seymour, a tropical biologist at James Cook University in Cairns, has developed a technique for tracking the movements of the Chironex using ultrasonic transmitters stuck on with surgical superglue. True jellyfish are dim-witted ocean drifters, but, the first time Seymour managed to tag a Chironex with one of these, it immediately headed straight for the bottom, then suddenly swam off covering nearly half a kilometer in 15 minutes. One simple fact underlies this behavior: box jellyfish are not jellyfish at all. Box jellyfish are voracious jellyfish which charge around in search of prey. Another remarkable feature of box jellyfish is their visual system. I know you don't see any eyes on them, but they actually do have eyes. 24 eyes arranged in clusters of six, one on each side of their cuboid body. Each cluster consists of two types of eyes - simple light-sensing pits and sophisticated camera eyes. They are anatomically similar to human eyes, with lenses, retinas, and corneas, which enable the formation of detailed color images. But this unorthodox complexity begs a question: how do box jellies deal with all the information their eyes gather when they don't have a brain? No one knows. Why would a creature so apparently primitive need such sophisticated eyes, and so many of them? Some scientists have suggested that this is to do with searching for optimum hunting grounds. Their predatory eating habits explain why they have such lethal toxins. Stalking and pursuing fish is one thing, but how do you catch them when all you have are flimsy, rubbery tentacles? A Chironex sting does the work. Its venom can dispatch a fish in less than 2 minutes. This dangerous yet fascinating animal was thought to be confined to northern Australian waters, however, it has now been found in Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Seymour suspects that there are more deaths than are officially recognized; people are getting stung and killed all over the tropics without anybody realizing the true cause behind it. 

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