It’s been almost forty years since Gerry Anderson’s supermarination hit of the 60s but stingrays are back, with a vengeance.

Linda Jurjevic suffered a sting on the ankle when entering the water at Wattamolla south of Sydney, reports the Illawarra Mercury but more painful has been the media follow-up to the incident. Her husband, overwhelmed by media requests for interviews said, “It was just a small fish but everyone is acting as if it was the Loch Ness monster.”

Stingrays, it appears, are everywhere. Last October a stingray “leapt out of the Atlantic Ocean and embedded its poisonous barb” in a Florida man’s chest, reports The Times while a Kiwi crayfish diver miraculously survived an attack with ‘three stitches and a hole in his wetsuit’ reports UnderwaterTimes.com.

Even turtles are coming in for some rough treatment.

It’s all got a bit much for the burghers at Middle Brighton Baths. The drought, reports The Age, has meant much less stormwater run off, creating ideal conditions for the rays so the council are not just shark-proofing the baths, they’re ray-proofing it as well.

Crikey staff eagerly await the first story on killer seahorses.