| 1 | Snake rescuer gets overconfident (India) |
The first thing you see in this video from West Bengal is a mustached man standing triumphantly with a python resting on his neck, basking in the applause from a townspeople. The next minute, the python gives everyone a shock of reality by trying to strangle him.
The scene was the village of Sahebbari, West Bengal, in northeast India. Villagers had summoned forest ranger Sanjay Dutta after they spotted an enormous python attempting to swallow a goat near a school. They claimed that the python was 5.5 metres long (who knows if this was true).
Dutta was experienced, and seized the python quickly with an animal control pole. Next, he should have placed the python in a sack and released it into the wild. Instead, he decided to walk around the village like a king wearing a python as a decoration.
Things soon went wrong when the python began wrapping a coil around his neck. The villagers pulled it away, and the cheering resumed. The python tried again. The villagers pulled it away, and the cheering resumed. Then the video cuts to a much savager attempt by the python to strangle Dutta. He staggers forward, and this time his fans only just save him.
Many commentators weren’t sympathetic to Dutta’s flaunting of his capture, with one expert tweeting that “An animal has to be put away in a bag or a box immediately after capture”.
| 2 | Snake eggs in sandpit? |
In January 2018, a furious debate was sparked in Australia when 43 “snake eggs” were found in a primary school sandpit. The eggs were found in St Joseph’s catholic school in New South Wales, 350km north of Sydney. The eggs were white, and 12 were initially reported by the children, but when two local wildlife rescuers arrived, they found 31 new eggs, which had clearly been deliberately buried for safekeeping by some mother creature.
The rescuers suspected them to be water dragon eggs, but one shone a torch through, spotted a tiny baby snake inside, and declared them to be of an eastern brown snake. He spotted “a small pink worm” with eyes inside.
The implication was clear: the eggs could have soon hatched and wiped out the entire school (maybe town). But controversy soon arose, as herpetologists stated that an eastern brown snake burying its eggs in sand was unheard of. In fact, it was extremely rare for snakes overall. It was behaviour much more akin to a water dragon, which was the initial suspect.
“The large number of eggs also points towards water dragons,” said expert Bryan Fry from the University of Queenstown. Unfortunately, the initial rescuer was unable to take pictures of the foetus due to a sudden hailstorm. In any case, no children were eaten by eastern brown snakes, and all was well.
| 3 | Ancient dawn snake fossil |
Tree amber is nature’s ultimate fossil preserver, acting as a superglue which perfectly preserves flesh, bones, and skin. The only thing it doesn’t preserve is DNA, meaning that there’s no prospects for reviving long extinct creatures. One particularly cool discovery came in 2011, from Canadian deposits of amber dating back to the late Cretaceous period 75 to 80 million years ago. Inside were the remains of a dinosaur with feathers, which they were even able to identify as black and brown coloured.
In the snake kingdom, the best preserved amber fossil discovered so far was the Myanmar dawn snake, whose remains date back to 99 millions years ago. In 2018, the remains were discovered in a Myanmar (Burma) forest, featuring 97 intact vertebrae with a head strangely missing.
The amber fragment was tiny, able to be held by a researcher with just two fingers. Yet technology allowed them to detect a bone structure which had changed little in 99 million years, at least the backbone anyway.
A rendering of the baby snake revealed a bluish serpent with green tinges. The team also found a second, possibly adult snake in sap nearby. It was dubbed the Myanmar dawn snake, or Xiaophis myanmarensis, and the team theorised that the snake could have existed in its primitive state for tens of millions of years before going extinct.
| 4 | Man survives rattlesnake-infested well |
In October 2018, headlines rang out that an Arizona man had survived 2 days trapped in an old gold mine infested with rattlesnakes. The tale began when John Waddell, 62, decided to investigate an old mine shaft on his property in Aguila, Arizona, approximately 90 miles northwest of downtown Phoenix.
50 feet down, his rigging harness suddenly snapped. Waddell plummeted another 50 feet to the ground, ripping the skin off his hands due to friction from the mine wall. As he hit the bottom, the bone in his leg snapped. He quickly saw a rattlesnake slithering across the mine shaft wall, heading in his direction. Waddell did all he could and killed the rattlesnake with a stick, as he lay in agony.
Over the next two days, he killed a further two rattlesnakes, of an unknown species (Arizona has 13). By the Wednesday, Waddell was beginning to hallucinate, and probably thought that the voice of his long time friend Terry Schrader was just another figment of his imagination. But it was all too real, and emergency services soon arrived.
Firstly, a paramedic winched himself down. He found Waddell alive but severely dehydrated, with broken legs, though able to talk. Eventually, they used a rig pulley system to lift Waddell out of the mine shaft, who was in agony during the entire 6 hour rescue, but thankfully not injected with 200mg of snake venom.
| 5 | The king of snake handling |
One 2018 headline was a tragic part two of a story from 2016. The original tale involved a Malaysian fireman who had supposedly married a cobra, believing it to be the reincarnation of his dead girlfriend.
In a story that circulated British tabloids, Abu Zarin Hussin was seen presenting flowers to a cobra. His new life partner was apparently a 10 foot cobra, but Hussin strongly denied the reports, saying that he was a firefighter who was involved in training other firefighters in safe snake handling. “They used my photos and started making up stories, saying that I married a snake” he said.
While he hosted 5 cobras in his home, this was only to gain a greater understanding of their nature. Hussin’s fame for snake handling only grew, and he took part in the talent show Asia’s Got Talent, where he wowed viewers by “kissing” a snake.
In 2018 though, Hussin was killed by a cobra, during a capture mission with other firemen in Bentong. He was admitted to hospital, but succumbed to the venom flowing through his veins. The snake was a spitting cobra (most likely Naja sumatrana), and Hussin was off-duty with his wife at the time. Hussin had learnt his snake skills from his father, and had spent two days in a coma from a cobra bite in 2015.
| 6 | Snakes appearing in strange places |
2018 was a decent year when it came to snakes appearing in random objects. The first was a mother from Adelaide, Australia, who was packing her child’s lunch one Monday morning. The mother opened the lunchbox, and succeeded in packing half of the food items, before spotting the snake. It was clearly a baby, and recognisably an eastern brown snake, which has a deadly neurotoxic venom.
Babies of this species are almost as deadly as adults. The lunchbox had a small gap by the hinges where the snake had comfortably stashed itself. The mother quickly closed the lid and stepped back, and phoned reptile hunter Rolly Burrell, who removed the snake, preventing it from the leaping out at the child at 1pm that day in the canteen. Burrell said that it was classic baby snake hatching season, and that she had been receiving 50 to 60 calls daily lately.
The second case was heart-pounding, but less death-defying: a corn snake found in a man’s breakfast cereal box in the UK. The Sheffield man was shocked when a 3 foot corn snake slithered out one morning, prompting a visit from the RSPCA. The officer joked: “I think he was expecting to have cornflakes for breakfast not corn snakes“. They implored any local owner who had lost a corn snake (a popular pet worldwide) to get in touch.
| 7 | Snakes wash into India’s villages |
2018 was a year of devastating floods in India’s Kerala state. A report earlier that year warned that Kerala was the worst equipped Indian state to deal with natural disasters, and the predictions came true when 400 people died from June to August in raging torrents, with 1 million displaced. Eventually, people began to return home, but now there was a new warning: an influx of horrific creatures like scorpions, insects and snakes.
A video went viral on twitter of a middle aged Indian woman trying to prevent an Indian python from slithering over her wall by banging a broomstick against the ground repeatedly for 90 seconds (she succeeded). Now the authorities warned that snakes could be hiding in cupboards, under carpets, or even in washing machines.
Several hospitals reported a spike in snakebite patients, and others were stockpiling antivenom in advance. Snake handler Vava Suresh had already captured 5 cobras in his Ernakulam district. Residents were strongly urged to sift through all belongings after reentering their homes, lest a murderous snake reappear later when they least suspected it.
| 8 | Burmese pythons – 2018 update |
2018 saw the continuation of Florida’s quest to eradicate over 100,000 invasive pythons from the everglades. The pythons have wreaked havoc on native mammals, and previous outlandish schemes included cooking them in pizza and hiring mystical Indian tribesmen. USGS scientists decided to analyse 400 invasive pythons captured from the Everglades over a span of 10 years, starting from 2001.
They expected to find that 100% were Burmese pythons, found in Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and only the extreme northeast of India. Instead, they found that 13 of the snakes had genes from the Indian python, found across most of India.
The implications were grim. While the two are closely related, Indian pythons are nimbler and faster than their Burmese cousin, and cope better with higher ground, rather than purely wetlands. Some of the invasive snakes were hybrids, bearing genetic signatures of both. Were genetically enhanced supersnakes gaining control of Florida? According to the scientists: “You bring these different traits together and sometimes the best of those traits will be selected in the offspring“.
150,000 Burmese pythons (or maybe hybrids) were estimated to be present in the everglades as of 2017. That year, the Indian tribesmen had bagged 33, and a 2016 bounty scheme resulted in 106 in being shot. But this was only a slight dent in their huge population, and genetic enhancements might have been why. The scientists did say that the exact implications were unclear – it was possible that they wouldn’t uniformly benefit from both sets of characteristics.
| 9 | Man bitten by severed rattler head |
The lesson of the following story is that a snake doesn’t need to have its body to send you to the hospital. This post-mortem snake assault took place in Corpus Christi, Texas, in June 2018. Jeremy Sutcliffe was helping his wife Jenny to weed a flowerbed in their garden when he spotted a western diamondback rattlesnake lurking. Sutcliffe grabbed his backyard shovel and swung, delivering a blow which cleanly separated the rattlesnake’s head.
The day was apparently saved, and Sutcliffe grabbed the severed head, assuming it was stone cold dead. But he got a surprise when its fangs sank into his fingers. He had triggered the dead snake’s gag reflex, and received an injection of venom as his prize. This wasn’t the first case of a snake head reactivating – a red-bellied black snake in Australia was apparently killed by a graveyard worker when it bit him 45 minutes post death.
Sutcliffe was airlifted to hospital, where he received 26 vials of CroFab, the standard rattlesnake antivenom used in US hospitals. This enabled him to dodge death, as 1 week later, the man was alive in a stable condition, with weakened kidney function.
Western diamondbacks (and eastern) are one of the least survivable members, due to a particularly huge venom yield of over 200mg. Remember this lesson the next time you’re camping by a fire and your friend drunkenly decapitates a viper. Copus Christi lies on the eastern end of the western diamondback’s range, but has a very high concentrations of this species, as this iNaturalist map shows. It’s probably the most abundant venomous snake in the city outskirts.
| 10 | Dog tales of 2018 |
Dogs have just as much to fear from snakes as we do, in fact more given their small size. The first dog tale of 2018 occurred in Camden Heath, England. It involved Toby, a 13 year old Spaniel who was unfortunately deaf. This meant that he was unable to hear his owner’s cries as he ran enthusiastically into the undergrowth.
The caution was warranted, as Toby met an adder, and came off the encounter with a bite to the face. His face was soon badly swollen, and he was rushed to a specialist vet, where he required 4 days of care before being released. The owner saw that Toby was playing with the adder, but was unable to instruct him to release the snake. Thankfully, Toby wasn’t disfigured for life, as his face deflated to its normal size, due to treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs.
Thousands of miles away in Arizona, Todd the golden retriever had no idea that he would meet his nemesis that day. It was a rugged countryside trail, always a place where a rattlesnake can materialise from nowhere. That didn’t stop the surprise when Paula Godwin almost stepped on a large rattlesnake while descending a hill. Somehow, the snake failed to rattle completely. But before Paula could fall victim, there was a rush of air as Todd the retriever dashed between her leg and the snake.
Todd received the snake’s fangs instead, and Paula was almost quick as her pet, bringing Todd to hospital within 10 minutes of the fangs striking. He received antivenom, and lived to tell the tale (or bark it). Pictures showed Todd with a grotesquely swollen right side of his face, yet he still looked pleased with his work.