ET Wednesday to include a discussion about the uncertainty of the kind of fish fighting the sea snake, at 9:00 p.m.
Trippe says the sea snake attacked the fish again as soon as he released them back into the water. "Venom toxins are among the most potent and precision-targeted molecules on Earth," Takacs adds. "This sea snake-fish encounter is a work-in-progress in 'nature's research lab' and this is how future medications are being 'designed,'" says Takacs, who notes that several drugs have been developed from snake venoms, for major diseases from hypertension to heart attack. WATCH: The stonefish hides on the sea bottom, undetectable to its prey.īy witnessing such predator-prey encounters, we get a window into evolution in action, says Zoltan Takacs, a herpetologist and pharmacologist who is the founder of the World Toxin Bank and an explorer with National Geographic. It's possiblly not really a stonefish, as Trippe thought, but actually a species of harmless frogfish, says Bryan Fry, a National Geographic explorer and biologist who studies venom at the University of Queensland. It's also difficult to identify the fish. But he agrees with Trippe that an elegant sea snake ( Hydrophis elegans) is a possibility, based on the coloring and location. It’s hard to identify the species of sea snake from photos, Murphy says, because the precise scale counts are often needed to distinguish similar types. Murphy, a sea snake expert at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. “I knew this was dangerous."įish are a regular part of the diet of many sea snakes, says John C. "I'm silly but not mad,” the spear fisherman, Rick Trippe, told BBC. He grabbed the animals out of the water for a quick picture, then released them. What is rare is for such encounters to be recorded.Īn Australian spear fisherman happened upon the sea snake/fish fight last Thursday off Darwin, in northern Australia. Photographs capturing a battle royale between what may be two of the ocean’s most venomous creatures-a sea snake and what is possibly a stonefish-have gone viral, but such face-offs probably aren't all that rare.
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