The kids at Guthrie Beach in New London have started calling Pamela Flynn “the jellyfish catcher.”

”When I'm here and I see them,” she said, looking up from the crossword puzzle she was working while sunning herself in a beach chair, “I try to scoop them up so the little kids don't get stung. Yesterday I took out about 30 of them.”

Her daughter, Caitlin, who works as an attendant at the beach, picked up the net her mother had been using to show the torn tentacle fragments still wrapped around it. Though it's probably a futile effort, the young woman said, the practice of netting the stinging invertebrates, then digging a deep hole in the sand to bury them, has become a new game at local beaches this summer, as beachgoers look to cope with their brush with the worldwide explosion in the jellyfish population.

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People are also reacting by simply staying out of the water. They are still coming to the beach, but opting for a quick dip rather than a swim to the raft, or not going in at all. Or, like avid kayaker Abbey Herd of Stonington Borough, they are so repulsed by seeing the masses of jellyfish in the waters in Long Island Sound that they are putting their boats and bodies into fresh water lakes and ponds instead.

”I couldn't even attempt to count how many I saw,” on her last kayak tip around Stonington Point a week ago, said Herd. “It really freaked me out.”

At Pequot Point Beach in New London Friday, 9-year-old Kiernan Bartlett was playing in the sand with her younger brother, Eamon, but hadn't gotten wet and probably wouldn't be that day.

”Yesterday we started swimming to the raft, and I saw one jellyfish, then another and another, so we decided to turn back,” said her mother, Veronica. “But when we got back, she said, 'Mommy, my arm stings.' I got stung, too, under the arm. It just ruins it, because now she doesn't want to go in the water. You can't relax and just enjoy the water. It's a bummer.”

Seasonal blooms in the jellyfish populations are nothing new, but this year's started earlier, has lasted longer and is heavier than any in recent memory, say beachgoers and marine scientists. Neither of the two types most commonly seen this summer - the reddish, circular lion's mane and the sinuous white sea nettle, which packs a more potent sting- are newcomers to the region's waters, scientists say, though sea nettles were rarer.

”The sea nettles prefer warmer water,” said Megan Barker, marine science instructor with Project Oceanology in Groton. “We had a very warm spring, and a warm June.”

Some beaches, she and others noted, have been hit with the infestation more than others, and the intensity can fluctuate wildly from day to day.

”We have good days and bad days,” said Jacque LeBeau, beach attendant at Pequot Point.

The variability seems to depend on water temperature - beaches in more enclosed areas with warmer waters have tended to have more - and the way the currents and tides are flowing and carrying the jellyfish along.

”They're considered plankton, so they go where the waves push them,” said Barker.

Dealing with jellyfish stings has become a regular routine for the staff of Project O, which runs summer marine science camps and educational boat trips. Barkley said the instructors and the visitors on the boat trips are often stung when they pull up the nets used to haul in sea creatures for a lesson, because jellyfish tentacles often get tangled on the lines. Campers, she said, have been getting stung, too, on trips to the beach, and some won't go into the water. A few people will have a serious allergic reaction to a jellyfish sting that can require a doctor's care, but for most people, Barkley said, simple remedies like the application of rubbing alcohol or sand and salt water, or a vinegar and water mixture are all that are needed to take away the microscopic stinging barb left in the skin by a jellyfish tentacle.

At Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, three people have come to the Emergency Department thus far this summer for treatment of jellyfish stings, compared to one last summer. “A few” have gone to Westerly Hospital, according to spokesmen for the two hospitals.

At state beaches along the coast, lifeguards have been equipped this summer with baking soda and spray bottles of vinegar-and-water solution to quell jellyfish stings, said Pamela Adams, director of state parks. Signs have been posted at Rocky Neck State Park in Niantic and some other state beaches warning swimmers about the jellyfish. Instructors at state-sponsored swimming lessons at Rocky Neck earlier in the summer had a hard time coaxing some of the children to go in the water because the jellyfish were particularly abundant.

”It was awful,” said Betsy Dean, associate executive director of the YMCA of Southeastern Connecticut, which taught the lessons. “Here we were trying to convince the kids to come in, that it's fun, and we had kids getting stung.”

Adams and Penny Howell, a fisheries biologist for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said the jellyfish bloom seems to be waning, and jellyfish-free waters may return soon. Howell said the infestation was noted as far west along the state's coast as Stamford.

”The peak seems to have passed,” she said, noting that jellyfish have short lifespans. “The next month or so, into September, is the nicest time to swim in the Sound anyway.”

Dave Sugrue, manager of Ocean Beach Park in New London, said that because of the inundation of jellyfish this summer, the beach has been promoting its other options for getting wet: the pool, splash park and water slide. In the last few days, he has noticed fewer and fewer jellyfish, and he is hoping the trend will continue.

”It seems like they're leaving,” he said.

Some are hoping that the disgust, annoyance and revulsion many felt in response to the jellyfish swarms of 2008 will translate into a kind of public awakening about the need to take action to repair the damaged ocean environment. Populations of many creatures that eat jellyfish, like larger fish and sea turtles, have been decimated, and jellyfish can thrive in more polluted waters than other animals.

”This kind of infestation is happening all over the world this summer, and they're showing up in places where they haven't been before,” noted Stephen Loomis, biology professor at Connecticut College, who has been encountering the jellyfish on his frequent rows on the Niantic River. “Some think it's a sign of the degradation of the oceans, and of overfishing of the natural predators of jellyfish, and of increases in water temperature (due to climate change). It's one in a large number of pieces of information we're getting that the oceans are being degraded. We're getting signals and we need to pay attention.”

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