Man bitten by sea snake off coast of NT in a stable condition | Northern Territory

A man is recovering after being bitten by a sea snake on a fishing vessel off the coast of the Northern Territory.

The man, a fishing crew member in his 30s, was bitten on Monday morning while aboard the vessel in the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf, near the border of the NT and Western Australia.

He was evacuated via helicopter by the air medical retrieval service LifeFlight later that morning, with the help of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

He was taken to the Mungalalu-Truscott airbase before being flown to Broome hospital by the Royal Flying Doctor Service on Monday afternoon.

The man is now in a stable condition, the WA Country Health Service said.

While it is not clear how he came into contact with the sea snake, fishing boats often unintentionally catch the animals while trawling for fish.

A sea snake bite killed a trawler fisher working off the NT coast in 2018, the first sea snake death in Australia in more than 80 years.

All Australian sea snakes are venomous, with some capable of causing paralysis and death, but it is rare for them to bite humans.

The animals regularly wash up on Australian shores and have increasingly been seen in other regions where they hadn’t been previously recorded, including New Zealand and Japan.