A highly-venomous sea snake has washed ashore alive in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.<\/p>\n
The yellow-bellied sea snake was discovered on \u014chope Beach.<\/p>\n
“These snakes live out at sea, and when they wash up it usually means they\u2019re unwell \u2013 often from the cold,” the Department of Conservation said today on social media.<\/p>\n
“They\u2019re highly venomous but generally calm and not a risk unless handled.”<\/p>\n
There was no record of the protected species biting anyone in New Zealand. <\/p>\n
Sea snakes generally lived in warmer tropical waters to the north of the country, DOC marine science adviser Karen Middlemiss told 1News last year.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Snakes generally didn’t last long after arriving in New Zealand, she said.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Anyone who found a yellow-bellied sea snake was advised to steer clear, keep pets away, and call 0800 DOC HOT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A highly-venomous sea snake has washed ashore alive in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. The yellow-bellied sea snake…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[50,111,139,69,147,1756,406],"class_list":["post-411021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animals","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-tauranga-bay-of-plenty","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}