Eva Bradley A Napier man is due to arrive home today after receiving a rogue scorpion bite at Auckland Airport's domestic terminal yesterday.
Dale Rodel, 19, was admitted to Middlemore Hospital's emergency department in the wake of the bite but was discharged this morning.
Biosecurity entomologists were today continuing investigations to establish how the scorpion got into New Zealand and then to the domestic terminal.
"It's a mystery to us how it got that far," said Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry spokesman Brett Sangster.
Mr Rodel, who lives with his South African parents in Greenmeadows, was checking in for a flight to Napier when he felt a sharp pain in his foot.
"I thought it was a piece of glass at first. I looked down and I thought it was a spider but it happened to be a scorpion dangling from my foot," he said from hospital yesterday.
The incident prompted a major alert with Biosecurity New Zealand called in to collect the scorpion and sweep the terminal for others.
Scorpions are not native to New Zealand and therefore represent a potential biohazard.
Experts also inspected Mr Rodel's luggage and searched a hotel room where he stayed after arriving from South Africa on Sunday night.
With more than 1500 species of scorpion, MAF was likely to identify the intruder today but it could take longer to tell how the scorpion ended up in the domestic terminal's departure lounge.
"The assumption is that it came in his baggage but that's not the only avenue we're exploring," Mr Sangster said.
All baggage coming into New Zealand goes through X-ray machines designed to detect organic matter, including large insects, although it depended on where they were in the luggage.
Probably fewer than five scorpions had been found in New Zealand in recent years.
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