No, you’re not imagining it. And no, you’re not in the Caribbean. There are indeed jellyfish in Minnesota’s lakes.
Don’t take it from us, take it from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which this week took to Facebook to announce it had received multiple reports of freshwater jellyfish in lakes across the state.
The jellyfish are not native to the state but “do not appear to cause ecological damage to the lakes they inhabit,” according to the DNR. Sightings of the jellyfish in Minnesota lakes go back decades.
When they are in their adult stage, known as the “medusa,” they have a bell-shaped body measuring between 5-25 mm in diameter and can have up to 500 tentacles!” the DNR says.
“However, they spend a lot of their lifecycle at the bottom of lakes in the polyp stage, making sightings rare. ”
The jellyfish do sting small aquatic invertebrates but do not affect humans or fish, according to the DNR.
It’s believed that this particular species originated in China’s Yangtze River, and have been in Minnesota since the early 1900s.