Bite from sea snake kills Briton working on Australian boat
A BRITISH backpacker has died after being bitten by a highly venomous sea snake as he hauled in a net on an Australian trawler.
The 23-year- old man is believed to have died within two hours as shocked crew members headed for land at full speed.
There was nothing that emergency services on land, sea and in a rescue helicopter could do to save the man by the time the trawler reached the town of Borroloola in the Northern Territory, some five hours after the alarm was raised.
His death is regarded as extraordinarily unlucky – because despite their highly toxic venom, sea snakes are regarded as harmless unless they are disturbed or trapped.
The man, who has yet to be publicly identified but is understood to have been on a work permit, is the first person to have died from a sea snake bite in Australian waters, according to the Marine Education Society of Australasia.
Associate Professor Bryan Fry, of the University of Queensland, said the man was the victim of a ‘tragically unlucky accident’.
Sea snakes are mostly gentle animals and people go scuba diving among them all the time, he told the BBC. But he added: ‘In a fishing trawler situation, where they’ve been potentially dragged through the water in a net, they will come up injured and perhaps looking to lash out.’
Dr Michael Guinea, of the Charles Darwin University, said previously that sea snakes are ‘equally poisonous, if not more poisonous, as things such as our tiger snakes and western brown snakes’.
It is also unusual to find that, in rare cases where someone has been bitten by a sea snake, enough fatal venom has been injected.
The alarm that a member of the crew on a trawler had collapsed after being bitten by a sea snake while pulling up a net was raised on Thursday while the vessel was off Groote Eylandt, some 400 miles east of Darwin.
It was not known last night how other members of the crew reacted to help the Briton, but when the alarm was raised a Care Flight emergency helicopter was dispatched to the trawler, while ships in the area changed course to help.
But St John Ambulance operations manager Craig Garraway said the Briton could not be saved. He was pronounced dead by the time the trawler reached Borroloola.
The Foreign Office said it was supporting the man’s family and was in contact with the Australian authorities.
A Darwin fisherman was bitten on the finger by a sea snake earlier this year. No poison was injected, but the snake’s teeth left him with a severe infection and he came close to having his finger amputated.