Heads or Tails?
When you hear the word ‘scientist’ you might imagine someone in a white lab coat bent over a bench littered with test tubes. Or maybe your idea of science is fieldwork, so the word conjures an image of someone with a butterfly net or binoculars. What you probably don’t think of is a man wearing boots stepping on snakes in a box. But that’s what João Miguel Alves-Nunes did — over and over again.
Alves-Nunes is a biologist at São Paulo State University in Brazil. In order to figure out better ways to prevent snakebite, he needed to know why snakes sometimes bite and sometimes don’t. Alves-Nunes and his team created what they called an arena, a box roughly 4 x 5 feet with an aluminum floor and Styrofoam sides three feet high. They placed snakes, one at a time, in the arena. Then Alves-Nunes stepped into the arena and very gently, so as to not harm the snake, stepped on it in various places to see what would and would not provoke a bite. He repeated the procedure with lots and lots of snakes. The team recorded all of what they called “the encounters,” but what I might have called “the horror show.”
This wasn’t quite as foolhardy as it sounds. The boots were no ordinary hiking boots. They were leather and covered in foam, and they reached all the way to Alves-Nunes’ knees. The boots worked fine when he danced with Bothrops jararaca, a venomous snake found in southern Brazil, Paraguay, and northern Argentina. However, when he tried this with a rattlesnake, the angry pit viper punctured the boot and bit him a good one. “When I was bitten by the rattlesnake during the simulation, I recorded it with a camera,” Alves-Nunes told Science magazine in an interview about this research. “And what was the first thing I did? I called my mother right there. Now I have this embarrassing moment on video: me crying to my mother.”
Alves-Nunes recovered, but in the process found out that he’s allergic to the antivenin. Unpleasant as the experience was, it led to new research questions: How does bite strength vary between B. jararaca and rattlesnakes? And what is the best way to make snake-proof boots? That’s a scientist for you.
And the results of the study? It turned out that females are more aggressive than males, and small snakes are more likely than large ones to bite. No matter the size or sex, snakes are more likely to bite you if you step on their heads rather than their tails. I’ve made a note of these facts, but I’m still trying to find out where to get a pair of those boots.
’til next time,
Avery
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Photo by Usman Khaleel via Pixabay