Prosecutor Tobias Taane was in the shallows at Papamoa beach when a stingray barb punctured his foot.
WARNING: This story contains images of a stingray injury
Prosecutor Tobias Taane is used to fending off the odd legal barb.
But wading in the shallows at Pāpāmoa beach over Waitangi weekend, stinging submissions from “the dark side” were the least of his worries.
Taane was keeping an eye on his partner’s 4-year-old son when he felt a “chomp” on his foot.
“I thought I had been bitten by something,” he told NZME.
His first thought was some kind of fish, or a bronze whaler shark.
“Freaking out”, he immediately tried to grab the 4-year-old who was just out of reach.
Then he looked down.
“There was just blood all through the water,” he said.
He began to hobble out, as his partner called out to ask why he was leaving the water.
“Then she saw all the blood, and started freaking out.”
After clearing away the blood with some water, Taane said they saw “a great big hole” in his foot, and his partner realised what must have caused the damage: a stingray.
Other beach-goers came over to help – one gave him a towel to wrap his foot in, while another sprinted about 500m to a Surf Lifesaving tower.
“By that point, I think [other] people started realising something had happened in the water, and the beach just cleared, the water just cleared.”
The surf lifesavers who turned up hadn’t seen anything like it before, and radioed the main surf lifesaving club at Pāpāmoa, where there was a doctor and nurse on site.
He was given pain relief and they helped him keep his foot elevated.
To begin with, it was “not horrendously sore”, but then came the “surges” of pain.
“I mean, I was able to grit my teeth through it,” he said.
He was in fairly good spirits – even cracking jokes – and his main concerns were the pulled pork he’d put on the barbecue that morning, and a jury trial due to start on Monday.
“I thought, ‘I’m probably not going to be able to do the trial’... My partner’s just going, ‘don’t even think about that. You’re bleeding profusely.’ And, at that point, looking at the foot, my pinky toe went purple and curled over,” he said.
It turned out the tendons in his foot had been severed.
He was also thinking how relieved he was that it was his foot that got the barb, and not his partner’s preschooler.
As they waited, they were told by the surf lifesavers that there were orcas swimming nearby.
“And of course, orcas feed on the stingray. So we were all thinking, ‘oh, that’s why the stingrays were coming right up’.”
After about an hour on the beach, Taane said an ambulance arrived and took him to Tauranga Hospital.
A surgeon cleaned out the wound with a piece of gauze, pulling it through the hole and out the other side to make sure there was no debris or barbs left inside.
“Usually there’s like a pen-like barb still stuck in the skin,” Taane said.
“But I think the stingray was probably a really big one because it just punched a hole right through ... So it’s straight through and out again.”
Taane was stitched up and sent home late that night.
While the surgeon suspected severed tendons, it only seemed to be affecting the small toe and wasn’t a major cause for concern.
But a week or so later, Taane’s condition deteriorated. He was having very high fevers and becoming delirious as a full-body infection took hold.
He was hospitalised immediately, “got slammed with antibiotics”, and had surgery to clean the wound out.
“They reattached my tendons, stitched it all up, discharged me at the end of the week, and then basically it was just wound care for the stitching.”
After about three weeks, the stitches were taken out. Taane said he soon noticed the wound was reopening, and the hole kept getting bigger.
“So, yeah, I’ve just had this hole in my foot since, I guess, mid-February.”
He has a pump attached to it, which helps it to continue to drain.
The PICO device that operates the suction has been clipped to the waistband of his suit pants this week, as Taane went back to the courtroom for a trial.
He hasn’t been in pain, and said it felt great to be back in court.
“I missed it,” he said.
Taane, who is in his early 30s, trained as a lawyer after an earlier career as a blacksmith and foundryman.
He’d left that line of work after a serious injury, deciding the work was too dangerous.
“I had molten metal spray on my leg, just hit me on the side of the leg,” he said, adding that it was the same leg as the foot that was barbed by the ray.
“That completely burnt through and just cooked a huge chunk of leg.
“Because it was so hot, though, I didn’t feel anything. It just burnt through my nerves.”
It had taken two surgeries, and about two years of recovery until he got feeling back in that part of his leg, and he wonders if that earlier damage had impacted the recovery from the stingray barb.
After two months off work, Taane began working from home, but now, three months on, he is back in the office – where he has a stingray as his desktop screensaver.
He plans to get a tattoo of a ray on his foot, once it’s healed.
During his time working from home, he’d been able to appear in court remotely, and had received lots of support from colleagues.
He had received an email from the executive judge for the Tauranga District Court, Judge Paul Geoghegan, wishing him well for his recovery, which had been “really nice” to receive.
And he had appreciated the collegiality of the Tauranga legal community.
“I had a couple of defence counsel text me, or e-mail me saying, ‘God, I heard what happened’, ‘I hope you’re all good’, or ‘when’s the prosecution coming for the stingray?’.”
In Taane’s view, a “wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm” charge against the ray could be justified, but he concedes there would be a strong case for self-defence.
Clinton Duffy, Auckland Museum’s curator of marine biology, said it certainly sounded like Taane had received a stingray wound.
He noted that first aid for stingray wounds was to stop the bleeding, then pour water as hot as the patient can bear over the wound.
This would “almost instantly stop the pain, which can be debilitating and worsen shock, as well as help clean the wound”.
No one in New Zealand was “actively tracking” stingray incidents, as far as he was aware, and nor had he noticed an increase in reports.
Duffy said there were three species of stingray in New Zealand waters – eagle rays, and short and longtail stingrays.
Eagle rays were present in shallow water, particularly in harbours and estuaries year-round, while short-tail stingrays tended to be most abundant inshore during summer.
Longtail stingrays were predominantly found offshore.
All three species were most abundant around the upper North Island, and it was possible rising sea surface temperatures meant they were becoming more prevalent around the South Island.
Stingrays were not an aggressive species and “only sting people in self-defence, generally when they are stood on”.
“Stingrays can be present almost anywhere,” he said.
“Keep an eye out for them when entering the water. Avoid diving over or stepping on objects that look like a smooth, dark rock. It could be the back of a stingray that is partially covered with sand,” Duffy said.
“Shuffle your feet when getting into the water to give stingrays a chance to get out of your way before you step on them.
“When removing hooks from stingrays, flick them on to their back so they can’t sting you, or get someone to hold the tail with a towel.”
Hannah Bartlett is a Tauranga-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She previously covered court and local government for the Nelson Mail, and before that was a radio reporter at Newstalk ZB.