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Sea snakes are washing up on New Zealand’s shores
- Waterluvian 5y agoI love how Australia has all the nature that wants to kill you and apparently New Zealand has none of it.
- akiselev 5y agoAnd the one venomous migrant species - it happens often enough to be legally protected in NZ since they came on their own - is curious, not aggressive, and doesn’t have fangs long enough to be much of a threat to humans. Quite charming.
- mikeywazowski 5y agoI presume you're referring to the Katipo. Note that white-tails and redbacks have also migrated to NZ from Australia. Also, from Wikipedia: "A katipō bite produces the toxic syndrome latrodectism; symptoms include extreme pain and, potentially, hypertension, seizure, or coma." Not exactly what I'd call charming.
- potatochup 5y agoIn case anyone is interested, Katipo bites are extremely uncommon. 2 deaths ever and 1 bite recorded from 1951 to 2012. > Hornabrook, in his 1951 review of the early literature on katipo spider bites, found a total of 22 cases, including 2 deaths. Since 1951, there has been only one reported case of a katipo bite, involving severe myocarditis in a 22-year-old man, despite katipo spiders inhabiting coastal beach dunes around New Zealand. [1] https://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2012/03/09/bitten-by-a-katipo/ https://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2012/03/09/bitten-by...
- pvaldes 5y agoThose spiders bite to protect its nest in the high grasses. It was a uncommon danger in cereal fields, when people harvested in shorts with a sickle, but currently everybody use machines for that.
- dwd 5y agoIn comparison around 2000 people are bitten by redback spiders in Australia each year. Bites were historically even more common when everyone had a dunny out the back.
- akiselev 5y agoI was referring to the yellow-bellied sea snake in the article. From it's Wikipedia article [1]: > Though rare, the yellow-bellied sea snake is the most commonly seen sea snake in New Zealand waters, to the degree that the species can be considered indigenous to New Zealand and protected under the Wildlife Act 1953. The katipo is native to New Zealand and the two spiders seem to been introduced by humans. The yellow bellied sea snake just floats over so often it's protected. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow-bellied_sea_snake#Distribution_and_habitat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow-bellied_sea_snake#Distr...
- mikeywazowski 5y agoAhh.. I don't know why I immediately assumed you were talking about spiders - my apologies! I agree with everything you've said.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoThe only thing you need to really watch out for are what’s known colloquially as the Drop Bear. Also best not to aggravate a brown snake.
- keithnz 5y agoin fact, our native animals (mostly birds) are really really unprepared for hostile species which is why they are getting decimated by introduced pests like possums, rats, ferrets. They evolved traits like being "smelly" so that they can find each other easily.... which, for a predator is like opening a fast food shop with neon flashing lights.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoYou don’t have to get so exotic. One of the devil researchers in Tasmania has been trying to get domestic cats banned from the island. With all the unique wildlife and already strict quarantine laws, I don’t know why cats don’t have to be registered in some areas.
- HWR_14 5y ago> I don’t know why cats don’t have to be registered in some areas. That's a strange way to write "are forbidden from certain islands"
- xupybd 5y agoThere are similar efforts in NZ. https://morganfoundation.org.nz/cats/infographic-damage-domestic-cats-new-zealand/ https://morganfoundation.org.nz/cats/infographic-damage-dome...
- petre 5y agoHow is imprisoning a cat in the house 24/7 not animal abuse? My indoor cat develped OCD and died early at 10y of age because it developed hyperthyroidism according to the vet. I stayed at the 3rd floor with concrete and a fence under by balcony at the time, so 100% death rate if the cat fell off. Got the cat when I lived at a house with a yard, had to move over, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten a cat in the first place. I will never ever keep a cat indoors 24/7, better just refrain from getting one if no yard is available. Also no caged mammals, marsupials or birds.
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- drdeadringer 5y agoThe "New Zealand Quarantine" is effective.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoIn New Zealand, it's usually not the animals that are trying to kill you, but the earth itself. That's one of the reasons I moved to Australia, there's less chance of being killed by the wildlife here than by an earthquake or a volcano in New Zealand.
- awesomeusername 5y agoI think you've had too many beersies
- mr_toad 5y agoYou’re more likely to be killed by a motor vehicle in either country.
- the-dude 5y agoI was not disappointed to find this too can be blamed on global warming.
- squarefoot 5y agoDuring the first 45 years of my life, if I wanted to see a parrot I had to either go abroad, or to some friends who had one in a big cage, or at the zoo. Then roughly during the last 7-10 years they started to appear first near the south west areas then they took the entire city. Now I hear and see them every day flying out of my window. https://anamericaninrome.com/wp/2020/04/parrots-in-rome/ https://anamericaninrome.com/wp/2020/04/parrots-in-rome/ Also seagulls, that were nowhere to be seen away from the sea (which is over 30km from here) until years ago, now build their nests on roofs and can attack people to protect their eggs. As an upside, at least they took over pigeons. Not sure if it's due to the global warming, still worth of attention.
- dredmorbius 5y agoSeagulls can travel quite some distance from the coast. The state bird of Utah is rather famously the California Seagull. Salt Lake City is 730 mi (1200 km) from San Francisco. https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol/utah/state-bird/california-gull https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol/utah/state-bird/californi...
- kybernetyk 5y agoEverything can be blamed on global warming.
- teslaberry 5y agoi love how every article relating to natural phenomena in modern print MUST attribute a scenario 'possibly' to global warming. always. this is how you know you're being primed. "sea snakes.....could be global warming, you know the warming is making the snakes arrive....could be" god was always part of the discussion in religious times.
- N00bN00b 5y agoThey are trying to evolve and become land snakes.
- salzig 5y agoAustralia is dangerous, even those snakes realise that.
- pmkiwi 5y agoIf they go through MIQ first, all good!
- vorticalbox 5y agoMight be nit picking but aren't snakes venomous not poisonous as stated in the article?
- magneticnorth 5y agoYes; the article itself does refer to them as venomous but people are quoted as saying poisonous, though maybe the article's use of 'venomous' is a correction that happened after your comment.
- sandworm101 5y agoThey can be both. I wouldn't recommend eating any venomous animal as their venom may poison you. The venom may be digestible, but get a tiny scratch from one of those fangs and you will not be happy.
- askvictor 5y agoCan be, but iirc, there is only one snake that is in fact poisonous (to eat). Most snake venom is complex, unstable molecules that your stomach acids would destroy pretty quickly.
- kens 5y agoI happen to have an Oxford English Dictionary next to me so I took a look. Definition 1 for poisonous is "Containing or of the nature of poison; having the quality of property of poison; venomous". 1665 ... poisonous viper ...
- technothrasher 5y agoThe OED is listing common usage, while the biological jargon is specifically drawing a distinction in the way the poison is delivered by an animal.
- malshe 5y agoThe article mentions a few times that "there are no snakes in New Zealand." This reminded me of the short story titled "There are no snakes in Ireland" by Frederick Forsyth in his book No Comebacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Comebacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Comebacks
- notRobot 5y agoOne of my favorite books of all time! For those who don't know, it's a collection of really great short stories with plot twists.
- malshe 5y agoMine too. My father is a huge fan of Forsyth, so I read his books growing up. My mother, on the other hand, is a big fan of Jeffrey Archer, so I ended up reading many of his books as well. I love the short stories with a twist in the tail but I haven't kept up with this genre. If it's not much to ask, do you have any suggestions of authors?
- gtvwill 5y agoMmm I had a boss on one job who used to scoop see snakes up out of the water by their tail and bring them up on deck for the rest of us youngins to see. Wild creatures. Their colours are amazing.
- BrissyCoder 5y agoThe only good snake is a dead snake.
- toss1 5y agoSeriously? Not only are snakes fascinating to anyone who has a clue, they are also quite helpful. After building gardens, we had a minor plague of voles (kind of mouse-like, but eating plants and behaving a bit like moles) eating the plant roots - in the spring, just go touch a plant and it falls over, it's rootball having been eaten back to the size of a tennis ball. The next summer we started seeing garter snakes, and several years later a milksnake (I live in the Northeastern US). The voles aren't 100% gone, but mush less of a problem. Watching an ecosystem balance itself is wonderous.
- BrissyCoder 5y agoLive Australia (where I think the snakes are probably much more venomous than NE US?). Have young children so any snake I see on my property other than a green tree snake will be executed.
- happytoexplain 5y agoThere's a universe of difference between "kill all snakes" and "kill snakes on your property if you have children and live in Australia and aren't sure it's non-venomous".
- philliphaydon 5y agoI was living in bronte in Sydney and heard a ruckus one morning, family next door with 4 young kids screaming. About 20m later the father came out with a shovel and a snake on it that came up through the toilet bowl, was the 4yo that discovered it. I don’t know what kind of snake it was but that would be enough for me to not want to raise kids in Australia lol.
- trhway 5y agoif you think that a pretty limited and easy to avoid danger from snakes warrants that, imagine what almost every animal in existence should think about humans, the source of unlimited and unavoidable danger to almost everything living.
- aunty_helen 5y agoPigs. Nz might seem to have no dangerous animals, insects and sea life, but we do have a lot of wild introduced pigs. They are more than capable of killing and many hunters come off second best even if equipped with a rifle. Friend of a friend is in a wheelchair now because of a hunting accident involving wild pigs.
- JimTheMan 5y agoAnd yet a popular activity seems to be "pig sticking." Which broadly speaking, involves using dogs to find and hold a boar so you can jump in and stab it to death. Some people are crazy wild!
- mycall 5y agoCase in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IHwKJOZZ6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IHwKJOZZ6U
- gregwiin 5y agoMaybe there is something in the sea that makes the sea snakes trying to go on land. As the article said, one might be a climate, but we can't say for sure as the researchers need to find out more about the cause.