Mysterious, rare 'Blue Button Jellyfish' washes ashore off Florida's Cape Canaveral coast

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - An unusual sea creature is coming ashore on the Space Coast.  

Blue Button Jellyfish were spotted on Cape Canaveral beaches this week, catching vacationers and locals off guard. 

On Friday, FOX 35 found some kids at the beach who were very observant and helped our crew hunt for them. 

You have to look pretty close because they’re tiny, about the size of a quarter.

We saw them washed up in the wet sand. Others saw them in the ocean, and everyone was surprised to see the creature up close for themselves. 

"I just saw a little blue thing with a white top. It honestly just looked like a button on somebody’s shorts," said Trevor Swartz visiting from Iowa. 

"I thought it would be for some fancy beer, some fancy bottle cap," said Jayden Quan visiting from NYC with his parents. 

Both of these beachgoers had good guesses, but what they actually saw is a rare Blue Button Jellyfish, washing up on beaches in Brevard County. 

"It was just weird. I had no idea. My first thing was – does it bite? Is it safe to be in the water?" said Dave Roby who’s also visiting from Iowa. 

Beachgoers had a lot of questions because many had never seen this type of sea creature before. 

"I’ve been here for 35 years, and I’ve never seen one," exclaimed Nick Bauder who was fishing on Friday. 

Turns out, the tiny buttons are a pretty big deal to scientists. 

"Take a close look at them because they’re really interesting," said Richard Aronson who leads the Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences Program at Florida Tech. 

The scientist says, their name is deceiving. They aren’t actually a jellyfish at all but instead hundreds of tiny hydrozoan polyps all clinging together to form one creature. 

"They’re a bunch of different specialized kinds of them, and they all work together as a colony," said Aronson. 

You can look but don't touch because the blue buttons pack a punch and do sting like jellyfish. 

There’s no telling how long they'll stick around.

"I couldn’t believe it," added Roby. 

If you’re heading to the beach, be on the lookout for something white and blue sitting on the sand.

"Wear sandals. You don’t want to get stung," concluded Quan. 

We asked our scientist why we’re seeing them on shore right now. He says, it has to do with the wind and currents at sea. These jellies were most likely caught up in a convergence which he described like a cylinder of rotation spinning in the ocean and sending all the tiny blue jellyfish to the beach.