Stingray warning link to climate change
Jamie Cunningham’s lung collapsed after he was stabbed by a stingray at Oreti Beach, and a medical paper on his injury suggests Kiwis should expect to see more ray injuries because of climate change.
The left side of Cunningham’s chest and his right foot were stabbed when he was at the beach, near Invercargill, in 2018. Fentanyl, morphine and ketamine did little for his pain.
Another Southlander, Stuart Sutherland, 40, was stabbed in the leg by a stingray on the same beach last January.
Cunningham’s thorax injury was so rare it has featured in a new medical academic paper, written by surgical register Benjamin Black, research fellow Monica Londahl and consultant surgeon Konrad Richter.
There had only been a handful of severe thoracic stingray injuries reported in Australasia and even fewer fatalities, the most notable being Steve Irwin, researchers said.
An Australian wildlife personality, Irwin died in September 2006 when a stingray barb pierced his chest causing massive trauma. Irwin had been filming on the Great Barrier Reef.
Cunningham, 52, previously took off ‘‘yards’’ of skin and broke a collarbone road cycling. However, the stingray was 10-out-of-10, ‘‘absolutely mental’’ pain, he said.
He had taken his kids boogie-boarding on a hot late-December day. In about 30cm of water, Cunningham reckoned he stood on a juvenile stingray, which stabbed his foot. He believed he then stood on an adult ray because the whole ground shifted below his feet and the adult stabbed him in the ribs.
He thought he had trod on a shell and then a branch until the excruciating pain of the venom took hold.
‘‘I thought this is a funny way to die. Not funny, but unusual, peculiar.’’
He walked out of the surf but could only pull in enough breath to say one word at a time. His wife thought he was close to dying, but Cunningham recognised he was not bleeding out.
He said it took the ambulance about 40 minutes to get to the beach. He spent two nights in hospital.
Cunningham’s biggest concern was not the wound, but the venom causing his diaphragm to lock up.
He was glad his case was being published in a medical journal, so medical professionals could know in advance how to give better and faster care.
There is no anti-venom for stingray toxin and ray venom remains a poorly understood phenomenon, the paper says.
Envenomation [the venom going into the body] can obscure the clinical picture and delay bacterial infections.
Symptoms vary but can include sweating, temporary loss of consciousness because of insufficient blood flow to the brain, nausea, diarrhoea and hypotension [low blood pressure] and irregular heartbeats. The venom can kill body tissue.
Cunningham’s presentation in hospital appeared to represent a more severe injury than what was discovered.
The research paper was published in the New Zealand Medical Journal yesterday. The article cites a 2018 study that says as climate change progresses there will be more stingrays in New Zealand waters and injuries will become more common.
Cunningham has swum again at the Catlins, but won’t go back into Oreti’s turbid water.
Sutherland’s lower leg was injured while he fished in January, but he considered himself lucky considering what happened to Cunningham. His incident is not covered in the medical paper.
He had a high pain tolerance, but the stingray was ‘‘excruciating’’.
About 7am on January 29, he was on the deep end of a flounder net. He thought ‘‘my calf had snapped’’ or a shark had bitten his leg. He saw a flash of something black swim away. ‘‘It would have been at least a metre wide.’’
He felt the barb rip out.
‘‘The blood was just pouring out.’’
He got out of the water and his neoprene waders were pierced. But seeing there was not a gouge out of his leg, he figured it wasn’t a shark.