Photographs capturing a battle royale between what may be two of the ocean’s most venomous creatures—a sea snake and what is possibly a stonefish—have gone viral, but such face-offs probably aren't all that rare.

What is rare is for such encounters to be recorded.

An Australian spear fisherman happened upon the sea snake/fish fight last Thursday off Darwin, in northern Australia. He grabbed the animals out of the water for a quick picture, then released them.

"I'm silly but not mad,” the spear fisherman, Rick Trippe, told BBC. “I knew this was dangerous."

Fish are a regular part of the diet of many sea snakes, says John C. Murphy, a sea snake expert at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.

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