| 1 | Africa’s main venomous snake |
The puff adder is a thick, stubby snake measuring 80-120cm, which lurks in bushes and has a dangerous haemorrhagic venom. Most importantly, it holds the title of the most widespread venomous snake in Africa. Puff adders appear in every single country south of the Sahara desert. No country is exempt from its terrifying ways: Ghana and Ivory Coast to the west, Ethiopia and Kenya to the east. In southern countries like Mozambique, statistics reveal them to be the number 1 cause of snakebite, easily beating black mambas.
Puff adders are common mainly because their habitats are so flexible. They can appear in grassy plains, parched savannahs, trails in game reserves and woodlands alike. Puff adders only avoid the driest and wettest extremes: true deserts and rainforests. On their territory map, there’s a gaping hole where the Congo rainforest lies.
Puff adders also have a small enclave in Saudi Arabia and Oman. While puff adders don’t have the deadliest venom, they have one of the highest death tolls in Africa simply by being so common.
| 2 | Lazy, before suddenly pouncing |
The puff adder is a particularly lazy snake, which can wait for weeks in thickets without doing anything. The clues about its nature can be found in its names. Its Latin title is Bitis arietans, and arietans translates as “to strike violently”. The puff adder is an ambush snake which has excellent disguise in low bushes. They’re normally lethargic, but when a prey species wanders past absentmindedly, they can lunge extremely quickly.
Puff adder have extremely large fangs which are capable of piercing soft leather. Some rodents die instantly because of the sheer weight and force of the puff adder’s body. These vicous strikes last less than 2 seconds in total.
As for “puff” adder, this has nothing to do with inflating their neck like a cobra. Instead, it come from a strange noise they make when confronted by predators, in the rare case that they see through its camouflage. This noise sounds exactly like a puff of air and can be surprisingly loud. It’s a similar noise to the leopard tortoise nearby, leading to a theory that the tortoise is mimicking the far deadlier puff adder to increase its own survival changes (Batesian mimicry).
| 3 | Blends perfectly with bushes |
The puff adder lacks any flashy patterns, not even hidden zigzags and barcodes that only reveal themselves when you get close. But that’s how the puff adder likes it, for this species is a master of camouflage. Puff adders average at 1 metre long, and are 15-20cm when born. The Saudi enclave veers smaller at 80cm, while the longest African snakes can reach 1.7 metres. With their fat, stubby bodies, they have the illusion of looking even larger.
Puff adders have a light cream belly, while their body is brown to dark grey. This is interspersed with beige-coloured lines, which are positioned at distant intervals, like a ribcage spread too far apart. The overall appearance is like a cracked and parched savannah floor.
In thick leaves or a thorny African bush, this snake can be almost invisible to the human eye. This is the kind of snake that appears in a classic “spot the snake” image, where people sit squinting at pixels, trying to see through its camouflage. The puff adder also has two large stripes on its face, which cross each eye and make some members look like they’re wearing goggles.
| 4 | Eats almost anything |
The next stage of the puff adder’s assault depends on its prey. With shrews, small mammals, birds, toads or lizards, they’ll keep a tight hold until the venom works it magic, but with larger rodents or rabbits, they’ll stand back and wait for them to slowly succumb.
Puff adders are vulnerable to the biting, gnawing teeth of larger prey, and need to be cautious. Their diet is as unfussy as can be, leaning towards rodents but also featuring birds, amphibians and reptiles. One of their confirmed prey is the four-striped grass mouse (Rhabdomys pumilio), an 11cm species with black and white stripes like a skunk. This small mouse inhabits most of southern Africa, particularly gardens, fields and shrubland, which brings it regularly across the puff adder’s path.
In the amphibian kingdom, puff adders regularly dine on African red toads (Schismaderma carens), which look like a strangely shaped clay brick when sitting still.
| 5 | Ignores its kids, but makes loads |
The puff adder is the official holder of one record among snakes: the highest number of newborns at once. The puff adder is ovoviviparous, giving birth to live young, and a Czechoslovakian zoo captive from Kenya once gave birth to 156 at once.
The average is also high, at 20-40 snakes with 50-60 being perfectly normal, compared to 2-13 for a scarlet snake in Florida. Supposedly, the puff adder pushes out plenty of unfertilised eggs as well, so if you’ve ever fancied boiled snake eggs for breakfast, then this is the species to track down.
Nobody’s certain how long puff adders live in the wild. The record in captivity (where the species fares well) was 16 years, so the average in the wild is most likely 10 years. There’s another phenomenon in captivity as well: that the puff adder often gorges itself so full that it dies. The species has no breaks on its hunger; it just eats and eats and eats (and eats) until the plate in front of it is empty, sometimes forcing it to regurgitate whole animals.
| 6 | Serpent of deception |
Most snakes use their forked tongues for olfactory (smelling) purposes, sniffing out prey species or even subtle changes in atmospheric humidity. But the puff adder’s tongue waggling skills have evolved to a whole other level.
Starting in 2017, biologists gathered 4600 hours of puff adder footage, covering 86 individual snakes, using camera tripods placed in strategic locations around Dinokeng Game Resource (South Africa).
What they saw amazed them. In multiple instances, they noticed puff adders sticking their tongues out and waggling them around, not briefly, but for extended periods of 30 seconds, after which they’d repeat the cycle again.
Slowly but surely, the biologists would notice frogs creeping into the frame. The puff adder kept up the act in the grainy footage, before the frog strayed too close and was devoured. The puff adders were using their tongues to lure in prey, by mimicking the appearance of the frog’s own prey. It’s possible that they evolved this trick to compensate for their poor leap distance, which is only 5-10cm. Interestingly, the luring was only used on amphibians and not rodents.
| 7 | Double camouflage |
That isn’t the puff adder’s only special hunting technique, as it turned out in 2016 that they camouflage their smell as well as their appearance.
A few facts raised the scientists’ suspicions. Firstly, the puff adder never takes shelter underground, despite its vulnerability. Secondly, it remains completely still when threatened by predators rather than fighting back. The most suspicious fact was that mongooses and meerkats often walk right past puff adders without noticing them, even stepping over their heads.
The scientists gathered various snake species and gave dogs corresponding scents, in a “scent match” test. The dogs ran to the correct snake in almost all cases, but the puff adder was the exception. The smell left the dogs confounded, despite their legendary noses, which are trained to smell drugs and even the adrenaline of stressed criminals fleeing a scene. The puff adders were untraceable, despite only being a few metres away.
This chemical camouflage, known as chemical crypsis, had been detected in the harlequin filefish before, but never a land animal.
| 8 | Skills of the puff adder |
The puff adder looks like the lazy stoner of the snake world, but they secretly have a variety of athletic skills. For one thing, they’re excellent tree climbers, which helps them to sniff out unguarded bird eggs.
They’re also excellent swimmers, as seen in a news story from May 2017 when a puff adder was spotted swimming across the vast Gariep Dam, near Norvalspont in South Africa. It was surrounded by water on all sides, and was quickly dubbed the Gariep Dam monster. Cameras captured the snake swimming for kilometres without giving up.
Then in December 2020, a South African family spotted a puff adder floating along a sandy shore in the western Cape. It was the Lundt family’s last trip to the beaches before they all slammed shut due to a new wave of COVID-19. Instead of pristine sparkling ocean, they were greeted by a snake slithering over the water like it was as solid as glass. Puff adders can even curl up into a ball and fall asleep while floating on water.
| 9 | Bite consequences |
With their infamously lazy temperament, puff adders have a habit of curling up by the side of footpaths to relax. People are always stepping on them as they camouflage against the foliage, and this contributes to their gigantic bite rate. Their venom doesn’t make the top 30 worldwide, but they rank highly within the viper family. With an LD50 score of 0.9mg-3.7mg, they successfully out-toxify the African rhinoceros viper (1.1mg) and Orsini’s viper of Europe (2.17mg). The two deadliest vipers are members of the Indian “big four” snakes: the Russell’s viper (0.4mg) and the saw-scaled viper (0.24mg).
Some statisticians rank this species first in annual Africa snake deaths, but others point to the less widespread yet far more vicious black mamba. Only 15% of puff adder bites lead to death, and that’s when untreated as well.
Doctors have a ready supply of antivenin on hand for puff adders, unlike the secretive hairy bush viper over in Kenya, a rare snake to have no antivenin discovered. As usual in Africa, the main problem is getting the antivenin out to remote villages.
| 10 | The venom causes blood chaos |
Scientists have identified several of the specific toxins in puff adder venom, including Ba100, bitiscetin, and bitanarin, a post-synaptic neurotoxin. The thrombin-like enzymes (TLEs) have some of the most visible effects. They deactivate fibrogenin in the bloodstream, an important blood-clotting agent, causing watery blood to gush from the wound. This is generally a snake of blood chaos, rather than neurotoxic symptoms like drooping muscles (despite containing a few neurotoxins).
Blood blisters are also common, as is random spontaneous bleeding. Puff adder bites are also notorious for causing swollen limbs, due to toxins that massively increase vascular permeability, sending a rush of blood to the bitten body part. The mildest bites have only redness and pain, but the unluckiest suffer from necrosis, and the sloughing off of dying tissue, sometimes down to the whiteness of bone. This is because of the venom yield, which varies massively. 150-300mg per bite is the average, but individual snakes can produce 750mg, with the fatal dose in humans believed to be 100mg. This sails past the European viper at 9-10mg per bite.
Nausea and vomiting are the entry-grade symptoms. Sometimes, the necrosis is severe enough to cause amputations, changing the victim’s life forever. This is a snakebite of two halves: the consequences can be dire if untreated, yet at the same time, treating them is quite easy.
| !! | BONUS: eaten by other snakes |
Though equipped with many snake weapons, puff adders aren’t even close to the top of the pecking order. Fellow snakes often feast on them, including the following confirmed species:
- Black-necked spitting cobras – extremely common in western and central Africa.
- Cape cobra – found mainly in southwest Africa (South Africa, Botswana). See a cool video here.
- Anchiete’s cobra – relatively uncommon, found in northern Namibia and Angola.
- Snouted cobra – a species of southeast Africa (Mozambique, Zimbabwe, southern Namibia).
- Mozambique spitting cobra – the spitter of southeast Africa.
It appears that cobras have a particular liking for puff adder flavours. This is because of the security granted by their highly neurotoxic venom, Only a cobra can be confident of paralysing a puff adder rapidly enough to not be bitten in the process. It helps that cobras are particularly fast and nimble species.
Puff adders will frantically attempt to escape, accelerating way beyond their usual speed, and sometimes succeed. But if a cobra lands one bite, then it’s too late, and its fate is inevitable. See this brutal video of a snouted cobra hunting a relatively small puff adder, which went viral in 2020. Other confirmed predators of puff adders include tawny eagles and southern ground hornbills.