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If you’re scuba diving and a six-foot-long sea snake is popping out of the shadows, here’s what you need to know.
First, calm down. Although sea snakes rarely attack recreational divers, a venomous bite from one can quickly become deadly, as with sea snakes. A trawler in Australia in 2018.
Second, the best thing you can do to survive when attacked by a sea snake is to resist the urge to run or fight.
“These big sea snakes can swim much faster than we can, so we can’t escape,” he said. Rick Shine, a herpetologist at Macquarie University in Australia. He adds that hitting the snake is also a bad idea. “The snake is likely to get very angry about this and may actually turn into a more aggressive mood.”
So what should a diver do when surrounded by a sea snake? according to study Published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, Dr. Shine and her co-authors suggest that you let these highly venomous reptiles slide around and lick you.
They say the sea snake doesn’t want to bite you. He wants, well…
Dr. “Actually, he’s just a love-sick kid looking for a girlfriend and making a pretty stupid mistake,” Shine said.
Shine took advantage of last year’s Covid-related shutdowns to analyze a dataset collected in 1994-95 by the study’s co-author Tim Lynch. At that time Dr. Lynch was completing her PhD. Observing olive sea snakes (Aipysurus laevis) off the northeastern coast of Australia. And during his 250 hours underwater with 158 sea snakes, he discovered several remarkable trends.
For starters, olive sea snakes tended to approach divers most frequently during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter months during the breeding season, which runs between May and August. Male snakes were much more likely to swim towards divers than females. Men also spent more time researching female observers than women, sometimes calling themselves Dr. They wrapped themselves around Lynch’s limbs or rubbed their tongues against his wet clothing or exposed skin.
Finally, the habit of a sea snake to charge at something, such as when quickly swimming towards a diver, almost always preceded other sea snake antics – such as two male snakes fighting or a female running away from a chasing male.
Dr. “There have always been these really consistent stories from divers about what appears to be full-blooded attacks by sea snakes,” Shine said. “And you hear commercial divers say, ‘Oh, you really shouldn’t be diving in this part of the world in winter because sea snakes are so aggressive.’
But now, he says, all this observational data has put the bizarre behavior of sea snakes into context.
“I always expected the motivation for this behavior to be sex,” he said. Kate SandersAn evolutionary scientist at the University of Adelaide in Australia who was not involved in the research, Dr.
After all, there are countless examples of male animals trying to mate with something other than a female of their own kind.
Co-chair of the Sea Snake Expert Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Dr. “I mean, I was courted by sea turtles in the water,” Sanders said. “So yes, I mean, I’m buying.”
If you’re wondering how a male sea snake might confuse a human with a mate, remember that sea snakes, like land snakes, gather information about the world around them through their mixed senses of taste and smell.
Dr. “But when the snakes returned to the ocean, of course, they lost their ability to pick up cues from tongue movements, because many of these important chemicals were too large to be transmitted through water,” Shine said. “And so they have to rely on a vision, and it’s not that good.”
Interestingly, Dr. These waters are home to about a dozen species of sea snakes, but only olive sea snakes and their close relatives typically tango with divers, Sanders said.
One possible explanation is that male olive sea snakes are slightly smaller than females, which may mean they need to be extra motivated to find and secure a mate. And sometimes that enthusiasm can make them look for love in the wrong places.
Dr. “I don’t know how to say that except that the snakes are wearing their beer glasses,” Sanders said. “His hormones are distorting their behavior.”
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