It turns out that sea snakes don’t want to kill you; their motives are actually the opposite. A new study suggests that venomous sea snakes that “attack” divers are, in fact, just looking for sex and mistaking sea goers for breeding partners.
Ocean scientists have advice for those who encounter the animals while exploring the sea: don’t panic and stay still because the snake may just be trying to mate with you.
The study recently released by Tim Lynch, a senior research scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, is based on Lynch’s 158 encounters with olive sea snakes as a diver in the Great Barrier Reef, according to Vice.
Observations from Lynch and his colleagues found that unprovoked aggression from the slithering creatures almost always involved a male during the breeding season. This has led them to believe that the encounters resulted from “mistaken identity during sexual interactions.”
The study is “the first quantitative evidence on sea snake ‘attacks,’” according to the study published in
Lynch’s dives took place between 1994-95 and led to insights into the motives behind the olive sea snakes. With the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, he finally found time to publish the results.
“You can blame COVID for this,” Richard Shine, a professor of biology at Macquarie University, said to Vice. Shine is also an emeritus professor at the University of Sydney, and he co-authored the study alongside Lynch.
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“Tim Lynch did the work as part of his Ph.D.,” Shine said. “I examined his thesis in 2000, thought it was great, but he never published it. Stuck at home with COVID, I contacted Tim to ask if he was interested in collaborating with me to turn bits of his thesis into published papers. He agreed (bless his heart!), and this is the first one.”
The olive sea snake is highly venomous, and victims of their bites tend to be anglers who catch them and cause them to stress out, Shine noted. The threat is also present, albeit rare, to swimmers and divers.
“Agitated rapid approaches by males, easily interpreted as ‘attacks,’ often occurred after a courting male lost contact with a female he was pursuing, after interactions between rival males, or when a diver tried to flee from a male” the authors wrote in the study.
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The encounters suggest that a “reproductively active male, highly aroused, mistakes the diver for another snake (a female or a rival male),” the study said. “At first sight, the idea that a snake might mistake a human diver for another snake seems ludicrous, given the massive disparity in size and shape between those two objects. Nonetheless, this offers the most plausible explanation for our observations.”
The study also mentions how sea snakes often have poor eyesight, which explains why they charge divers.
Altogether, not much is known about the animals, but the scientists think there could be something worth studying in the reptiles.
“Sea snakes are very understudied, so the potential is huge,” Shine said.
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