An Australian visitor of a different kind - a spiky-looking marbled scorpion - has been found hiding in Queenstown.
The 3cm-long venomous male scorpion was spotted by a resident crawling across the floor of a Lake Hayes Estate home on February 28, and reported to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's Biosecurity New Zealand the following day.
Biosecurity NZ incursion investigator Graham Burnip, of Christchurch, told the Otago Daily Times the man who found the scorpion was told to place it in a freezer to kill it, and later sent it to the Biosecurity NZ lab in Christchurch for further investigation.
It appeared to be a ‘‘solitary hitchhiker'' that had most likely crawled into someone's luggage in Australia before being transported to Queenstown, or had been carried into Lake Hayes Estate on building materials shipped from Australia, he said.
The house the scorpion was found inside was surrounded by other houses still under construction, he said.
The number of Australian tourists visiting Queenstown, and the presence of an international airport with direct transtasman flights linking the two, was another obvious explanation, he believed.
‘‘It's a numbers game. It's just the volume of tourist traffic,'' he said.
Mr Burnip travelled to Queenstown earlier this week to check the house for more scorpions, but found nothing.
The scorpion is one of Australia's most venomous and Mr Burnip said its sting was ‘‘ . . . painful and it would put you off work and might put you into bed and make you feel very crook''.
