A snake breeder walked into my office carrying a kingsnake.
Before he left, he told me a story I haven’t forgotten.
He noticed a photograph of a banded sea krait hanging on my wall. These are highly venomous marine snakes from the Indo-Pacific, far removed from the waters off Texas.
He looked at the photograph and told me he had seen one.
According to his account, he had kayaked offshore near High Island, Texas, to fish around a rig. There, swimming in Gulf waters, he encountered what he believed was a banded sea krait. He described the animal as four to five feet long, distinctly banded and possessing something particularly important—a paddle-like tail.
There was an obvious problem.
Sea kraits aren’t supposed to be there.
Watch the video investigation here.
It would have been easy to write the encounter off as mistaken identity. Except his description immediately reminded me of another strange report.
Two anglers I know had been fishing around the 18-Mile Light on Sabine Bank when they saw a long snake swimming at the surface. They described it as bluish-white and black-striped, approximately five feet long.
And they described a paddle-like tail.
Now I had separate encounters from the same general region of the Gulf involving people familiar with snakes and describing remarkably similar animals.
That was enough to make me start digging.
Since then, reports of strange snake-like animals have come to me from other parts of the Gulf Coast, including Alabama and Florida. Some may ultimately have very ordinary explanations. Eels and other elongated marine fishes can look remarkably snake-like, and native snakes can certainly enter coastal waters.
But what about the reports that aren’t so easily explained?
And if a highly venomous marine snake from another part of the world somehow reached the Gulf, is there a mechanism that could get it here?
That question took my investigation into international shipping, ballast water and the long history of animals being transported far outside their natural ranges.
My new video, “Venomous Sea Snakes in the Gulf? Investigating the Reports,” examines the eyewitness accounts and the possibilities behind them.
To be clear, this is not evidence that sea snakes are established in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s an investigation of reports involving animals that witnesses believed were something that shouldn’t be there.
And this investigation isn’t over.
There are additional reports and possible explanations I intend to examine in future installments.
Because sometimes the most interesting outdoor mysteries aren’t about proving something extraordinary.
They’re about figuring out what somebody actually saw.
Chester Moore
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