Story highlights Nomad jellyfish and other invasive species are setting up home in the Mediterranean, displacing the native marine life

Fish and other sea creatures are believed to travel north from the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal

Haifa, Israel (CNN) Swarms of stinging jellyfish have invaded the beaches of Israel and the eastern Mediterranean, wrapping their painful tentacles around the limbs of unsuspecting bathers who ventured too far into the water.

The unwelcome visitors, who arrived in early summer, were gone within a few weeks, but these nomad jellyfish -- Rhopilema nomadica -- are a symptom of a much bigger problem.

They're not supposed to be here -- or anywhere along the Levantine basin or the eastern Mediterranean Sea for that matter. In fact, they are natives of the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles away.

Marine biologist Bella Galil says they came through the Suez Canal -- just one of a number of invasive species now making their home in the Mediterranean.

"We have this corridor pushing in all the alien species, who just push them out and replace them with a fauna, which is not the native one," says Galil, a marine biologist with Israel's National Institute of Oceanography.

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