While the sunshine may be an unpredictable visitor to UK summer shores, there’s one silly season certainty that you can count on. It’s an invasion striking terror into the hearts of humble Brits, causing widespread panic, forcing terrified tourists to abandon our seas and seek safer foreign waters. Yes, it’s the early summer newspaper headline, designed to get us all terrified of Mother Nature.

Whether it’s false widow spiders that leap from their webs and rot your flesh, vile sunspiders that inject novocaine into our British soldiers, rats the size of cows, man-eating foxes or a lone great white shark travelling across the Atlantic with the sole intent of savaging plucky Cornish surfers, testicle-munching pacu fish set to invade our seas … these genuine news stories have two things in common: they are factual nonsense, and they all contain the message that nature is evil, and she’s out to get you.

So recent headlines about swarms of barrel jellyfish about to close British beaches come as no great surprise. But is there any truth in them?

Certainly jellyfish are seasonal, and owing to a complex range of environmental features there are years when they will appear in far greater numbers. Warmer waters, plankton blooms, phosphate and nitrate-rich run-off from farmland, paucity of natural predators – all of these can play a part, and when the conditions are right, jellyfish numbers can rise dramatically.

With a limited ability to swim against ocean currents, the jellies get concentrated into dense rafts often close to the surface and tracking natural eddies. These will occasionally be stranded on beaches at the high tide mark, and it makes for a spectacular photograph (particularly if you place a wide-angled lens super-close to the nearest jelly, which makes it look huge, a technique known as “foreshortening”, used often in these type of wildlife reports).

Last year, and in 2011 there were newspaper headlines about “record swarms of compass and moon jellies” swamping our shores, and tales of lion’s mane jellies the size of dumper trucks, none of which really materialised. 2012 genuinely was a bumper year for jellies, but though there were no real ill effects, it did have the pleasant knock-on effect that Cornwall had the best year recorded for sightings of two of their most spectacular predators: sunfish and leatherback turtles.

On one sea kayak trip that summer I encountered numerous boggle-eyed flapping sunfish (the largest bony fish on earth and one of the most bizarre), and had a leatherback turtle (probably the world’s heaviest reptile, and a sight any mariner would treasure for a lifetime) paddle right into one of our boats. I’d rate it as one of my finest British wildlife experiences.

Bear in mind also that when you see the creepy photos of vast swarms of jellies stranded on beaches like an alien invasion, these are dense but finite aggregations, and 100 metres down the beach the sands may be completely clear. It’s also worth noting that while newspapers go for the emotionally loaded term “swarm” for a group of jellies, biologists use the much more appealing collective nouns “smack” or “bloom”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bloom of moon jellyfish in crystal waters off Mull, Inner Hebrides, Scotland. Photograph: Alamy

And what of the risk of jellyfish stings to us? Well, there are without doubt species of jellyfish around the world that are potentially lethal to human beings, some of which shut beaches for entire seasons. The box jellyfish of Australasia is officially the world’s most venomous creature, and has killed swimmers in the past. I have deliberately stung myself with a small section of box jelly tentacle, and it felt like being burned by a steam iron. Larger stings can lead to cardiac arrest, and mind-blowing pain.

It is also true that we do get several species in British waters that give sore stings: the mauve stinger, blue and compass all have sufficiently unpleasant stings for me to urge caution to the unwary (while the received wisdom is to place mild acids such as vinegar on to stings to prevent other stinging cells on the skin from firing, the NHS currently recommend putting shaving foam on to a sting).

We do occasionally get visits from the portuguese man o’ war, a genuine super-predator, with long trailing tentacles and a fierce venom. These are, though, one of the most fascinating creatures in natural history: not actually single jellyfish at all but colonies of symbiotic hydrozoans, and big enough to be easily avoided by swimmers.

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But what of today’s demon barrel jellyfish, which is apparently about to cancel summer? Well, I’ve read some reports of people who receive a mild nettle-like sting from them, although I myself have handled them many times without a reaction of any sort. The invertebrate charity Buglife reports that they are “gentle giants that feed entirely on plankton, so their sting is too weak to hurt humans”. They can get big, look mighty weird stranded on the sands, and could certainly fill up a fisherman’s net.

But are they going to close British beaches? Well, no. No teenage lifeguard is going to stop me going for a swim because of a few hundred creatures I would personally love to go and snorkel around. And councils probably do have the power to close beaches, but I would be staggered if it actually happened.

I don’t want to sound too flippant about this subject. People do get hurt by jellyfish, as they do by sharks and spiders, and I have great sympathy for the anguish and pain these effects may cause, but if you pay any attention to the statistics it is clear that nature is not out to get us. Fewer people are killed by sharks every year than by falling soft drinks machines, and people do not die on British beaches from jellyfish stings.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A compass jellyfish in Cornwall. Photograph: Charlotte Sams/Alamy

Jellyfish have been around for 500m years, they are almost entirely composed of water, and have no brain, heart or sophisticated nervous system, yet they continue to hypnotically glide through the world’s oceans, some exhibiting extraordinary natural disco-light displays, others providing nurseries for small fish amongst their stinging skirts. Would it not make more sense to encourage a fascinated respect for these creatures than try to scare us all?

I’ve spent my life swimming with giant crocodiles and great white sharks, catching the world’s most venomous snakes and allowing poisonous centipedes and black widows to wander over my hands, and the one enduring lesson I have learned is that these animals are not out to get us. Far from it. In most cases they want to get as far away from us as possible, and with good reason.

We humans are the most deadly species. We are the destroyer, and the animals reap the whirlwind. We have far more to lose as a civilised society from erroneous and institutionalised fear of Mother Nature than we have from the animals themselves – and conservation needs a public that loves nature and wants to preserve it. By making us afraid, the media is putting just one more nail in Mother Nature’s coffin.