Stripey

So here we have a sea snake, in fact the deadly “sea cobra,” heading for the surface to breathe (which it has to, ‘cuz it’s a reptile). The venom can kill, but the snake’s mouth is quite small, and it has a hard time opening wide enough to get a grip on a full-grown human.  It’ll go for the webs between your fingers, or so I’m told.

In any case the snakes I encountered were fairly shy, and spent their time nosing through coral, either trying to hide or looking for something to eat.

I’m told they can be more aggressive on the surface when they’re breathing, but not from my experience.

There’s a type of eel that is striped very like this and which likes to hide in tunnels it digs in the mud.  The first time I saw one of these, I thought, “Oh cripes, I could sit on one of these spider holes by accident and get killed!”

But no, that was an eel, not a snake.  Bite painful probably, but not fatal.