Fatal attraction: Scientists blame sea snake attacks on libido

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If you are scuba diving and a 6ft long sea serpent is emerging from the shadows, here is what you need to know.

First of all, stay calm. Although sea snakes rarely attack recreational divers, a poisonous bite from one can quickly become fatal, as was the case with a trawler fisherman in Australia in 2018.

Second, your best bet for surviving when charged by a sea snake is to resist the urges to run away or fight.

These big sea snakes can swim much faster than us, so we just can’t get by, said Rick Shine, a herpetologist at Macquarie University in Australia. He adds that hitting the snake is also a bad idea. Snakes will likely be quite angry about this and might actually fall into a more aggressive frame of mind.

So what should a diver besieged by a sea serpent do? According to a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, Shine and his co-authors suggest that you let this highly poisonous reptile crawl and lick you.

The sea serpent doesn’t want to bite you, they say. He is okay with it

In fact, he’s just a boy in love looking for a girlfriend and making a pretty stupid mistake, Shine said.

Shine took advantage of last year’s COVID-related closures to analyze a set of data collected in 1994-95 by Tim Lynch, co-author of the study. At the time, Lynch was finishing her doctorate by observing olive sea snakes (Aipysurus laevis) off the northeast coast of Australia. And over the course of 250 hours underwater with 158 sea snakes, he discovered several remarkable trends.

For starters, olive sea snakes tended to approach divers most often during the breeding season, which runs through the southern hemisphere’s winter months, between May and August. Male snakes were much more likely to swim towards divers than females. Males also spent more time investigating human observers than females, sometimes wrapping around Lynch’s limbs or sliding their tongues against her wet suit or exposed skin.

Finally, the habit of charging something, such as when a sea snake swam rapidly towards a diver, was almost always preceded by other sea snake shenanigans, like two male snakes clashing or a fleeing female. a male pursuer.

There have always been these very consistent stories of divers about what appeared to be pureblood sea snake attacks, 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 said, all of that observational data has put the particular behaviors of sea snakes into context.

I’ve always expected the motivation for this behavior to be sex, said Kate Sanders, an evolutionary scientist at the University of Adelaide in Australia who was not involved in the research.

After all, there are countless examples of male animals trying to mate with something other than a female of their own kind.

I mean, I was courted by sea turtles in the water, said Sanders, who is also co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Sea Snake Specialist Group. So yeah, I mean, I buy it.

If you are wondering how a male sea snake can confuse a human with a partner, keep in mind that sea snakes gather information about the world around them through mixed senses of taste and smell, just like snakes on earth.

But when the snakes returned to the ocean, of course, they lost that ability to pick up signals by touching the tongue, because most of these important chemicals are too big to pass through the water, said. Shine. And so they have to rely on a vision, and it’s not that good.

Interestingly, Sanders said these waters are home to a dozen species of sea snakes, but only olive sea snakes and their close relatives usually tango with divers.

One possible explanation is that male olive sea snakes are a bit smaller than females, which may mean they must be highly motivated to find and find a mate. And sometimes that enthusiasm can cause them to look for love in the wrong places.

I don’t know how you would put it other than snakes have their beer glasses on, Sanders said. Their hormones distort their behavior.

This story originally appeared on nytimes.com. Read it here.

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