Hōkawai Beach near Ōpōtiki has produced an unusual sight for the second time in a week, with a live yellow-bellied sea snake found stretched out on the sand by a dog walker on Friday morning.
Local man Paul, out exercising his dog Prince along the eastern Bay of Plenty shoreline, told 1News he initially mistook the slim, two-toned animal for an eel before he stopped and looked again. “I see it move a little bit, when I stopped and pulled up, I thought oh sh*t, that’s not an eel, that’s a sea snake,” he said. Prince came close enough to investigate before being called back, and the snake was alive enough to flick away when nudged. “As soon as I did one little flick, yeah, it wasn’t sick. It was quite lively,” Paul said.
It is the second yellow-bellied sea snake to appear on a Bay of Plenty beach in less than a week. The first was reported at Ōhope Beach on Monday, prompting the Department of Conservation to remind beachgoers that the slender, brightly patterned animal carries a potent neurotoxic venom and should not be picked up under any circumstance.
Despite the surprise these finds tend to cause, yellow-bellied sea snakes are not strangers to New Zealand waters. The species, Hydrophis platurus, has been recorded in this country since 1837 and is treated as a native marine reptile, listed for protection under the Wildlife Act 1953. According to the Auckland War Memorial Museum, there are at least 62 confirmed records of the species in New Zealand, and the Department of Conservation estimates that around a dozen sightings are reported in an average year, mostly along the upper east coast of the North Island. Cook Strait is generally considered the southernmost limit, although individuals have been documented as far south as Wellington and Westport, and the Manawatū coast in recent years.
What is unusual about the latest finds is the timing. The Bay of Plenty sightings have come on the heels of a deep low-pressure system that lashed the country with severe winds and heavy rain through the start of the week, with parts of Nelson and Tasman recording up to 300mm of rain in 36 hours and wind warnings extending across the lower North Island and Canterbury high country. DOC marine science adviser Karen Middlemiss said big weather events can shift the boundary between subtropical and temperate currents, sweeping pelagic species into waters they would not normally reach. “When you get storm events up there that are driving the oceans south, then they can get sort of flipped into different currents down here,” she said.
The trip is rarely a happy one for the snake itself. Yellow-bellied sea snakes are entirely tropical and pelagic, drifting in floating slicks and feeding on small fish in warm open ocean. They are the only true sea snake species with a global oceanic range, found from the east coast of Africa right across the Pacific to the western edge of the Americas. New Zealand sits at the very southern fringe of that range, and the cold water here is normally enough of a barrier to keep them out. They cannot regulate their body temperature in temperate seas, they cannot breed in our waters, and once they reach the beach they are usually past saving. “The waters are far too cold, so when they do wash up on the beaches, they don’t survive very much longer than a couple of days,” Middlemiss said. The Hōkawai animal is unlikely to make it back to warmer water on its own.
DOC asks anyone who finds a sea snake to keep dogs and children well clear and to call 0800 DOC HOT. The animals can deliver a serious bite if mishandled, but they are not aggressive and the risk is overwhelmingly to people who pick them up. Most beach finds in New Zealand are already dead or dying by the time they arrive, although a small number have been rehabilitated at marine facilities such as Kelly Tarlton’s over the years.
Wildlife rangers also ask that the snake itself be left in place rather than carried home as a curiosity. Even a dead specimen carries scientific value, because every new record helps build a clearer picture of how often these subtropical drifters are reaching New Zealand and where the prevailing currents are pushing them. The New Zealand Herpetological Society has been logging sightings for decades, and recent records have come from the West Coast and the Manawatū coast as well as the upper North Island, hinting that current shifts after big storms can spread the arrivals around the country rather than concentrating them in the warm north.
For dog walkers along the Bay of Plenty, the practical advice from DOC is fairly simple. Keep dogs on a lead during and immediately after big swell events, watch the strand line and the wrack carefully, and treat anything long, slender and brightly banded as a snake until proven otherwise. Stranded eels turn up on east coast beaches from time to time, but eels are uniformly dark and lack the bright yellow underside, distinct paddle-shaped flattened tail and clean black-and-yellow contrast that mark a yellow-bellied sea snake.
As for the snake on Hōkawai Beach, DOC was contacted shortly after Paul’s encounter and the animal was being assessed for possible relocation or recovery. Whether it survives or not, it has already done its small part in extending the record of an animal that has quietly visited Aotearoa for at least 189 years.
Have you spotted unusual marine wildlife on a Bay of Plenty beach this week, or do you have your own sea snake story from years past? Share it in the comments below, we would love to hear what readers have come across.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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