--- title: Warty Sea Wasp (Tamoya gargantua) scientific_name: Tamoya gargantua common_name: Warty Sea Wasp taxon: Box jellyfish published: 2024-01-02T16:34:02.960Z updated: 2026-08-31T20:30:14.422Z tags: Warty Sea Wasp, Tamoya gargantua, Box jellyfish, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/box-jellyfish/warty-sea-wasp --- # Warty Sea Wasp (*Tamoya gargantua*) ## Quick facts - **Group:** Box jellyfish (*Cubozoa*) - **Size:** 22 cm - **Diet:** Carnivore - **Activity:** Nocturnal - **Rarity:** Rare - **Habitat:** Open water near reef and sandy shallows, often close inshore - **Reproduction:** Broadcast spawner - **Hazard:** Dangerous, Venomous ## How to recognise it - bell shaped like a rounded cube rather than a dome, with a warty surface - four tentacles, one trailing from each lower corner - almost colorless and effectively invisible over a sandy bottom - swims deliberately in a chosen direction instead of drifting - bell up to 22 cm A box jelly is not a jellyfish that stings harder. It is a different kind of animal doing a different job. True jellyfish drift and catch whatever hits them. Box jellies swim, at a real pace, in a chosen direction, and they steer around obstacles. They can do that because they have eyes: twenty-four of them, in clusters of six set into each face of the bell. Four of the twenty-four have a lens, a retina and an iris that closes in bright light, and they are aimed upward through the animal's own tissue, at the surface. These are proper image-forming eyes on an animal with no brain at all, and how it uses what they see is still an open question. The sting is the other half. Cubozoan stinging cells inject faster and deeper than an ordinary jellyfish's, and the tentacle leaves a print on the skin shaped like the tentacle itself. If you are stung: get out of the water, flood the area with vinegar for at least thirty seconds, and lift any clinging tentacle off with a gloved hand or the edge of a card. The vinegar does not treat the pain - it disables the stinging cells that have not fired yet, so that removing the tentacle does not set off a second dose. For the same reason, do not rinse with fresh water, do not rub with sand and do not scrape with anything sharp: all three trigger the cells still loaded. Then get to a doctor, because reactions to a box jelly are not all local and not all immediate. It is almost invisible in the water, colorless and glassy over sand, which is most of the reason people find it with their skin. ## Also known as - **Portuguese:** Vespa-do-mar-galáxia ## Scientific synonyms - *Beroe (Epomis) gargantua* Lesson, 1829 ## Range South Pacific Ocean --- *Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/stinging/box-jellyfish/warty-sea-wasp)* *Updated: August 31, 2026*