When paddle-boarder Greg Gauget found a snakelike creature floating limp, but alive, off Maui’s Baby Beach (or Puuanoa Beach) north of Lahaina a few weeks ago, he did what few people would do: He went through exceptional efforts to save it.
Sea snakes are so rare in Hawaii that Greg didn’t know what he’d rescued until he got it ashore and he and a beachgoer looked it up on her phone. Greg also took a picture, essential for the documentation of his animal, a yellow-bellied sea snake.
Yellow-bellied sea snakes are the most widespread snakes in the world, ranging throughout the tropical waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans far from coastlines and reefs. Occasionally, though, the air-breathing snakes, which live mostly on the water’s surface, drift into higher latitudes. When one arrives in Hawaii, it’s the victim of oceanic currents that have carried the creature to waters less than ideal for breeding and feeding.
Yellow-bellied sea snakes eat small fish. The snake floats motionless, often among debris that collects at current boundaries, waiting for a fish to seek shelter below. If a fish hovers behind the snake’s mouth, no problem. These snakes can swim smoothly backward until the fish is within striking range.
With a lightning-fast sideways move of the head, the snake bites its prey, injecting a powerful venom with two tiny fangs, about 1.5 millimeters long (one millimeter is as small as the human eye can see.) It’s this cobra-type venom that gives sea snakes such bad reputations, and indeed, you do not want to get bitten by one.
Fortunately, sea snakes don’t want to bite us. Of the bites that do occur, nearly all are to anglers trying to remove snakes tangled in fishing nets.
The yellow-bellied sea snake is the only species of sea snake documented in Hawaii’s waters. We have 17 species of pretenders, though, that often trick people into believing they’re snakes. These are snake eels, harmless fish common on Hawaii’s reefs.
Sea snakes are like sharks in that for some people, no matter how many times they hear that these marine animals aren’t anything to worry about, they still feel that the only good one is a dead one.
Not Greg. After placing the ailing creature on his surfboard, Greg paddled it to shore, looked it up, took the picture and made some phone calls. The snake lived for a couple of hours. A University of Hawaii researcher (Greg didn’t catch the name) took the snake for study.
"I’m stoked that I decided to take action and help the snake," he wrote.
I am, too. Thanks, Greg, for attempting to save this extraordinary creature, and for sharing your story.
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Reach Susan Scott at www.susanscott.net.
