Along a beach on Yorke Peninsula I came across a sea snake in a 'puddle' as the tide was going out. It was about 30cm long, and skinny, and if I hadn't taken a second look I could have walked past thinking it was just a strand of seaweed. I took a second look because it's slight movements didn't fit what seaweed would have done in a puddle disconnected from the ocean. The snake was squirming in the puddle as the water was warming in the summer sun.
Excerpt from [0]:
"All sea snakes discovered so far are venomous and produce some of the most dangerous venoms known in the animal kingdom but most species are considered to be non-aggressive."
I could have stepped on this damn thing thinking it was seaweed, and I'm sure that would have inspired some aggression that I could have found existentially distressing.
In the most Aussie scenario possible, a passerby saved the snake by taking their thongs (flip-flops) off, picking up the snake between the soles of the two thongs, and taking it to where the tide still reached. It swam off energetically.
Unrelated story:
A few hundred metres up the same beach, where the sand meets rock pools under some cliffs, my (at the time ~7 year-old) son calls out "I found a squid", then 10 seconds later "it's turning blue!". His mother and I both immediately screamed DON'T TOUCH IT and started running towards him. He didn't touch it. It was a blue-ringed octopus[1]. Australian kids learn about them in primary school.
Here in the far southwest of the continent we've never had to worry about seasnakes, though as you say we are taught from age ~8? about stonefish, various jellies, sharks, blue-ringed octopus, conefish. Even normal octopus have a venomous bite, they just run away instead... we're also taught that any scratch contracted from coral is likely to get infected since marine-species bacteria is more aggressive or something... any diver will tell you that is false though.
I've had 3 Blue Ring Octopus sightings that I recall personally. The largest one I've ever seen was the size of a grapefruit; I had never heard of one so big before, but the tentacles were short and the rings were vibrant and it moved in my direction and I was veritably running on water in the opposite direction when I realised what I was looking at.
I had never heard of blue-ringed octopuses before. Thank you for educating me. From the wikipedia article:
>The blue-ringed octopus, despite its small size, carries enough venom to kill 26 adult humans within minutes. Their bites are tiny and often painless, with many victims not realizing they have been envenomated until respiratory depression and paralysis begins. No blue-ringed octopus antivenom is available.
Australia is a beautiful country and I have relatives there. I'd love to visit them, once the whole pandemic thing is over. I don't think I'm going to go swimming.
I'm replying to a likely rhetorical comment, but to not go swimming in Australia is, I can't even think of an analogy extreme enough; going to Germany and not trying their beer, choosing not visit the Grand Canyon in the US.
But I'm going to totally ruin my positive intentions with another story: Pondalowie Bay, Pondalowie Surf Break, down on the big toe of the foot of Yorke Peninsula[0]. That boardwalk shown in the picture on the link takes you to one of the best beaches I've been to (but I'm not much of a beach tourist despite how this thread is going), but that boardwalk is patrolled by swarms of bees and horse flies (I don't know if they're technically horse flies, but they were fucking big and they fucking bit and one bite actually drew blood - a little pinprick, but blood nonetheless - from a fucking fly).
But the beach... it was worth the blood debt.
Point Turton[1], took the kids out a kilometre from the shoreline and the gradient is so slight that the water was still only just up to my neck that far out and it's so clear, no seaweed, just white sand.
Make sure you know how to swim though. Even without the critters, beach currents are invisible and treacherous.
It's really sad that (most) animals don't understand when we want to save them from a perilous situation, and instead get frightened, and/or aggressive. Always lessens the feeling of having done a good thing to realize that the animal probably thought I was trying to eat it, with all the stress and panic that entails. But then again I might be humanizing them too much.
P.S. I can't imagine the stress of having small kids in an area with deadly animals. It's bad enough here in Austria, were there aren't as many dangers by far. Kids are too curious for their own good.
I was intending to reply saying that it's not something that we're constantly, or really ever, on alert for, primarily because I live in suburbia.
However, and I don't think this is entirely representative, we live across the road from a gully (and the other side of the gully is a big main road, we're not out in the sticks or anything) and a couple of our neighbours have seen brown snakes in their backyards. Brown snake may be a boring name, but they're no joke [0]. One neighbor lost a dog to a brown snake, and have since moved because of that.
Thankfully, we've never seen one in our yard. We do have a couple of blue tongue lizards though, but they're beautiful[1].
Coincidentally, my daughter, right just now while I was writing this, pointed out a huntsman spider on the outside of the kitchen window[2] - don't often see them out and about in winter.
Seriously though, these animals don't factor in to the average Australian's daily life - even as a parent. The mortgage and school and sport fees, they're the universal killers.
Excerpt from [0]:
"All sea snakes discovered so far are venomous and produce some of the most dangerous venoms known in the animal kingdom but most species are considered to be non-aggressive."
I could have stepped on this damn thing thinking it was seaweed, and I'm sure that would have inspired some aggression that I could have found existentially distressing.
In the most Aussie scenario possible, a passerby saved the snake by taking their thongs (flip-flops) off, picking up the snake between the soles of the two thongs, and taking it to where the tide still reached. It swam off energetically.
Unrelated story: A few hundred metres up the same beach, where the sand meets rock pools under some cliffs, my (at the time ~7 year-old) son calls out "I found a squid", then 10 seconds later "it's turning blue!". His mother and I both immediately screamed DON'T TOUCH IT and started running towards him. He didn't touch it. It was a blue-ringed octopus[1]. Australian kids learn about them in primary school.
[0]: http://www.mesa.edu.au/sea_snakes/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-ringed_octopus