A thick-bodied sea snake of northern Australian soft bottoms, banded when young and plain when adult.
To about 1.6 m, thick-bodied, with a small head that is barely wider than the neck and a paddle-shaped tail flattened side to side. Young animals are banded in cream and dark olive; adults lose most of that and are plain olive-brown. The paddle tail separates any sea snake from any eel at a glance, and the small head on a thick body separates this one from the more slender species.
It occurs on northern Australian soft bottoms and in New Guinea, hunting fish and eels over sand and among rubble, and it has to surface to breathe. It is strongly venomous, as all sea snakes are, and it is also not aggressive: sea snakes approach divers out of curiosity and around a diver’s fins in particular, and almost every recorded bite involves an animal being handled or caught in a net. The fangs are short and a wetsuit stops most attempts. That said, a bite is a medical emergency and needs antivenom, and the effects can be delayed by hours, so anybody bitten goes to hospital whether or not they feel unwell. Let an interested snake investigate and move on rather than pushing it away.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.