An Australian teenager emerged from a nighttime dip in the ocean with blood streaming from his feet and ankles in a gruesome mystery that doctors have struggled to explain.
Sam Kanizay waded waist-deep into the water at Brighton Beach in suburban Melbourne on Saturday evening, standing still for about 30 minutes. When he came out of the sea he was bleeding profusely from the calves down.
“The cold water numbed my legs. I felt what I thought was pins and needles, but maybe it wasn’t just pins and needles,” the 16-year-old yesterday told 3AW radio.
Photo: EPA
Washing the blood off his legs in the shower did little to stem the flow from what his family believed was an attack by sea lice.
“It sort of looked like hundreds of little pin holes or pin-sized bites distributed all over my ankle and the top of my foot,” he said.
Kanizay, who was rushed to hospital, said doctors could not explain what had caused the injury.
“We had a few people guessing that it was sea lice, but no one really had any ideas,” he said.
His father went as far as scooping some of the tiny critters from the ocean and posting a film online of them devouring small chunks of meat.
Some reports cited experts pointing instead to stingrays or jellyfish as the suspected culprits.
However, Jeff Weir, from the Dolphin Research Institute, said the injury was likely caused by opportunistic amphipods, a tiny crustacean that latches onto decaying plant or animal matter to help break it down.
“They are not there to eat us, but sometimes they might take a little bit, like mosquitoes and leeches and other things out there in the environment,” he said.
“He [Kanizay] must have been very, very cold and he wouldn’t have felt it,” Weir said, adding that he had experienced a similar injury on his forehead after a night dive 40 years ago.
The veteran marine researcher said Kanizay’s injury was much like a graze and he should not fear returning to the water.
“I don’t think there has been anything that has changed, there just aren’t that many people that stand really still for that long,” he said.
In other news, a man was knocked unconscious and three others suffered facial fractures and broken ribs after a whale slammed into a charter fishing boat off the north coast, the skipper said yesterday.
The 30-foot (9m) vessel was returning to port in the Whitsundays with eight passengers on board when a humpback whale rammed it from below, sending it airborne.
“Within a split second we all hit the floor, the boat launched up into the air and it dislodged everyone off their feet,” captain Oliver Galea said of Saturday’s drama. “None of us knew what happened.”
A 71-year-old South African man was knocked out and tended to by the boat’s crew while they alerted emergency services. A helicopter escorted the boat to shore where four men were sent to hospital.
The tourist was treated for a broken nose, while Galea needed eight stitches for a nasty head wound. A third passenger suffered facial fractures and another broken ribs.
“We see whales all the time, but it’s never [been] known for this sort of thing to happen,” Galea said, adding that some of the passengers spotted what they believed to be a humpback in the water after the accident.
The ordeal has not deterred any of the passengers, Galea said, who were “all in good spirits” after they got together on Sunday to eat their previous day’s catch.
“The main thing is we all got home, and we have a few battle scars to show,” he added.
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