Blue-ringed octopus terror: Boy ends up dead after picking up an innocent-looking seashell while snorkeling on a picturesque beach
A young boy has narrowly escaped death after one of the world’s most venomous creatures hid in an innocent-looking seashell he picked up on the beach.
Benaiah Tolley, 9, was snorkeling and collecting shells with his father at Point Peron in Western Australia last week when a blue-ringed octopus crawled out of one of the shells.
The boy held the shell for about 20 minutes as the pair swam around before emerging from the water and showing it to his mother and sister.
After they sat back down on their towels, the small but deadly octopus emerged from one of the shells, shocking his father Jason Trolley.
One bite from a blue-ringed octopus is enough to paralyze and kill an adult within minutes. Its poison is known to be 1000 times more powerful than cyanide.
Benaiah Tolley, 9, was snorkeling with his father last week to collect shells at Point Peron in Western Australia when a blue-ringed octopus crawled out of one of the shells.
Mr Trolley said they planned to put the shells back in the water until his daughter ‘panicked’ when the octopus crawled out.
‘My daughter, who is 11, was sunbathing and looked down and saw the octopus crawling out of the shell towards her. [She] came down the beach screaming, I thought she saw a shark or something,” he said Yahoo.
When Benaiah’s parents realized what he had brought, Mr. Trolley scooped it up with some trash from the beach and took it back to the ocean.
‘When I put him back in the water, the blue color on him lit up [and] We didn’t go back into the water after that,” he wrote online when he got home.
Mr Trolley posted a warning on Facebook that parents should always keep an eye on what their children are playing with on the beach.
“We are not going to collect any more grenades,” he wrote.
Others in the comments of the post were happy that a near-fatal outing became nothing more than an innocent lesson.
‘All the more reason to just take pictures! I’m glad everyone is doing well,” one person wrote.
“I never collect for this reason and they are also home to many little critters,” another added.
“There was a message just like this a few weeks ago,” said a third.
Sightings of blue-ringed octopuses have increased in Australia this past summer. Last month, another boy in Perth was rushed to hospital after being bitten by a boy.
His father Jason Trolley posted a warning on Facebook that parents should always keep an eye on what their children are playing with on the beach
The boy had picked up a shell from the beach for his niece without noticing that one of the creatures was also hiding inside until he bit him.
Another incident involved a toddler ‘clinging’ to his foot at a Fairlight rock pool on Sydney’s North Shore in November, and another incident at a rock pool in Bronte, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
Surf Life Saving NSW has urged people’be careful when exploring rock pools because of how small they are and good at camouflage blue-ringed octopuses.