Sticking point for many anglers: stingrays
After suffering a series of frustrations and bad breaks during a morning of wadefishing in West Galveston Bay, Juston Brune had reason to hope his luck was changing for the better.
It was not. Instead, it got worse — much worse, with the 40-year-old Wharton resident becoming one of the latest Texans whose recreation in the state’s shallow coastal waters turns in an instant into a painful and potentially health threatening encounter with a marine animal packing a potent toxic punch.
“I just thought I’d been having a bad day,” Brune said of the events of last Saturday.
He had been, relatively. Competing in the Texas Trio fishing tournament, which focuses on speckled trout, redfish and flounder, Brune had lost a “really good” flounder he’d hooked, endured a redfish coming unpinned because of an issue with his landing net and had the handle of his reel come loose when the nut holding it worked off.
But things were looking up by late morning when a trout crashed a topwater plug worked in a “gut” running through a shallow flat on the bay’s south shoreline. Brune and a fishing partner took separate sides of the channel, easing along its edge, plumbing the deeper water for the trout they knew were there.
Brune, who has fished the bays for 30 years, was doing what wade fishers know to do when walking in coastal waters: shuffling his feet along bottom instead of taking full steps, a move that prevents stepping square atop what some Texas coastal anglers, in a bit of black humor, call “Laguna Madre land mines.” Stingrays.
This can be an effective preventative measure against encounters with rays. But it’s not foolproof.
“My right foot slipped into a hole, and as soon as it hit the bottom, I got nailed,” he said. Intense pain
It sounded “like a .22 hit me,” Brune said of the moment the bony barb that sits atop the stingray’s whip-like tail drove through his neoprene wading boot and slammed into his ankle bone.
The pain was immediate and almost blinding.
“I knew exactly what had happened, but I didn’t want to believe it,” Brune said.
He hollered to his friend that he’d been hit and began moving through the knee-deep water toward the nearby shoreline, the pain so intense that when he reached the bank he fell and crawled onto a spot littered with driftwood.
“I didn’t care if there was a rattlesnake in there, or not,” he said. “I had to lay down.”
Maybe, he irrationally hoped, he’d only stepped on a stone crab, and the crustacean had lashed out, pinching him on the ankle with one of its powerful claws.
“But when I looked at my foot and there was blood squirting out of the hole in my wading boot, I knew it was a stingray.”
His four fishing partners scrambled and brought the boat to pick him up. The sharp, throbbing, intense pain — “like nothing I’ve ever felt,” Brune said — had him light-headed. His partners knew they needed to get him to help, quickly.
One of the group knew folks who had a nearby, bay-shore home they could access by boat. He phoned them and they motored to the location which was just minutes away.
The folks in the house knew exactly the right thing to do for stingray wounds. After quickly flushing the puncture wound with hydrogen peroxide, they filled a sink with hot water into which Brune immersed his foot.
The relief was almost instant, if far from complete.
“That’s the tried-andtrue, if not exactly hightech, treatment we use to relieve the initial pain (of a hit from a stingray),” said Dr. Rob Kaale, medical director of the emergency department of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. “Warm water — as warm as you can tolerate — is the fastest, most effective way to offset the toxins and ease some of the discomfort.”
Kaale and the staff at UTMB’s Galveston emergency center know a lot about treating stingray caused wounds. They get plenty of experience.
“Being located in such close proximity to the coast, we frequently see stingray wounds,” Kaale said. “Frequently” means a couple a week to sometime a half-dozen or more a week, with the huge majority of them coming between June and September, Kaale said.
“We definitely see an uptick in those cases during summer. But that just makes sense because that’s when the most people are in the water,” he said.
And the water’s where stingrays are. Texas bays and beachfront are home to several species of stingrays, the most common being Atlantic stingrays. But southern, blunt-nose and cow rays also can be found in Texas marine waters. As their laterally compressed, pancake shape body and underslung mouth indicates, rays are creatures of the bay bottom, with most species — the ones that cause the most problems for humans — spending the majority of their time either settled on bottom, waiting to ambush a crab, shrimp or other crustaceans or nab a recklessly inattentive and slow forage fish. Prepared to strike
Rays are not out to cause problems for humans. They invariable scoot away if their space is invaded. But put them on the defense by inadvertently stepping on them or sometimes even bumping into them, and they will, quite literally, lash out. And they pack a serious punch.
The barb protruding from a ray’s tail — on Atlantic stingrays, it’s on the top of the tail, about a third of the way down the tail from the ray’s body — is a masterful piece of defensive weaponry. The barb itself is pointed and serrated. It is sheathed in a thin, brittle material much like cellophane. The toxins — a potent mix of serotonin and a couple of enzymes — are encapsulated around the barb by the sheathing.
When the barb, driven by the slashing tail, penetrates its target, the sheathing breaks, releasing the toxins into the wound.
This envenomation results in immediate and severe reaction, with the serotonin being the primary cause of the almost blinding, throbbing pain and the enzymes assaulting tissue.
But the protein-based toxins have a weakness.
“Like most marine toxins, they are very sensitive to heat,” Dr. Kaale said. Heat breaks apart the fragile protein chains, robbing them of much of their potency. The faster a victim can get hot water on the wound — even if it’s water from an outboard’s cooling system “tattle-tail” — the better.
Almost all stingray wounds to humans — and there are scores annually along the Texas coast — are to feet and ankles.
“It’s rare to see a stingray wound anywhere other than to a lower extremity,” Dr. Kaale.
The wound itself generally is not a major issue, Kaale said. It’s basically a simple puncture wound. And seldom does the barb break off in the wound, he said. But if the barb scores a direct hit on a blood vessel, it could cause serious bleeding that calls for fast action in applying direct pressure to staunch the flow. And if the barb hits bone or a nerve, that ups the pain ante considerably.
But the pain caused by the stingray’s toxins or even the puncture wound itself are not the biggest health threat from a strike.
“Infections from some of the bacteria found in saltwater is a concern,” Kaale said. “Vibrio is one we worry about.”
The problem of infection is particularly acute for victims who have underlying health issues that depress their immune systems. Those with diabetes, or other health issues that put them at high risk for infections or slow healing of wounds can be especially vulnerable.
Kaale recommends anyone suffering a stingray wound see a medical professional as soon as possible, even if first-aid treatment is effective at dulling the toxin’s painful effects. Medical professionals can make certain the wound is clean, remove any pieces of barb or other foreign matter from the wound and take steps to prevent infections, including updating tetanus protection and injecting/ prescribing antibiotics to prevent infection. Moving on
It took more than two hours of soaking in hot water for Juston Brune’s stingray wound to moderate enough for him to hobble back to the boat and begin heading for the dock. But on the way, the crew stopped a couple of places to fish. They were, after all, still in a tournament.
“But nobody got out of the boat,” he noted.
Brune visited a doctor the next day, where the physician checked the wound, gave him an injection of antibiotics and a prescription for more.
Almost a week after the incident, the wound still throbs and his ankle is swollen, “a real pretty red and purple” and too tender to walk on. But Brune expects a full recovery with no long-term problems — the usual outcome of a stingray wound — and is looking forward to getting back on the water.
And he’s also looking forward to Father’s Day.
“My wife already told me what I’m getting for Father’s Day,” he said. “A new pair of Ray Guard wading boots.”