Stingray barb "as deadly as a bayonet" 

The stingray barb that struck Steve Irwin would have been as deadly as a rifle bayonet driven into one of his vital organs, Australian wildlife filmmaker David Ireland said on Monday.

Ireland, sometimes referred to as "the original crocodile man" and a world-renowned wildlife cameraman and film producer, said he was shocked and saddened to hear of Irwin's death.

Irwin, 44, was killed by a stingray barb through the chest while diving off Port Douglas in north Queensland, and it's thought likely he died from cardiac arrest.

Ireland said while he had never met his fellow wildlife movie maker, they had a mutual respect which was shared among the handful of people in the world who worked "close up" with wild animals.

"What happened today is just an absolute shock," a shaken Ireland told Southern Cross Broadcasting.

"There are not very many of us who work in the wilderness with wild animals; you could probably count us on two hands, there are probably only 10 of us in the world.

"Working with them the way the way we do things can go very wrong."

Ireland said he had done a film a few years ago on stingrays, "hand-feeding them and all sorts of things, always trying to highlight that in all our moves there's a very real danger".

"I don't want to go into this because I'm thinking of his family and what they must be going through, but they (stingrays) are very dangerous.

"They have one or two barbs in the tails which are not only coated in toxic material but are also like a bayonet, like a bayonet on a rifle.

"If it hits any vital organs it's as deadly as a bayonet."

Ireland said he had made the documentary on stingrays to show they were disappearing and "the problems they have surviving in the modern world".

"We get really close to them and show how they perform, but in one of the scenes I actually pushed one up into shallow water to make it strike to show how deadly they are," Ireland said.

"Wild animals are incredibly fast and a lot of animals have got very efficient defence mechanisms.

"We're very vulnerable as humans, working with animals like that."

Ireland has 25 years experience in filming everything from lions and leopards to sharks and crocodiles.

Known as the Original Crocodile Man, he played the lead role in his own wildlife documentary Crocodile Man, which was distributed world-wide on Discovery channel in 1990.

It played for a record 12 months in the Great Barrier Reef cinema in Townsville from 1990 to 1991.

Ireland said Irwin's death had brought home the fact that the animals that he and other wildlife filmmakers work with are "very real, and the dangers are very real".

"I never met him. The sad thing is we never shook hands. It's a very, very painful day for everybody," he said.