Stephen S. Hall
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It's a vertebrate, which means that it has a backbone, but other than that, it doesn't resemble many other vertebrates, which include us and other mammals and birds and so on. It's... truly unique in part because of the fact that it does not have legs, even though it did have legs tens of millions of years ago.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It kind of turned them back in because it found out that it could find its way into almost any habitat or any narrow space, any covert hiding place very easily because it didn't have legs and arms to manipulate. So it actually turned out to be a very good adaptation for self-protection. They range in size from three inches to 30 feet. They can live up to three decades. They can eat every day.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Some of them don't eat but one meal a year. And they are adapted to virtually every environment on the planet Earth except Antarctica. They can live in Saltwater, seawater, deserts, jungles, rainforests, swamps, high altitude, sea level altitude, temperate climates, equatorial climates. And they're cold-blooded, which means in all these different environments, they're basically...
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
able to gauge the temperature and warm themselves enough to maintain metabolism, even though they can't generate their own heat.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
People detest snakes for the most part. There have been kind of informal surveys, you know, what animal do you most detest? And snakes almost always top the list. Spiders rank high but never quite surpass snakes in their degree of loathing. One of the things that's really interesting is that this loathing is attached to fear, but it's different from fear. And it was not always the case.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
So, one of the things that's been fascinating to me is to go back and see how ancient cultures, when we're talking about Egyptian culture, Greek culture, and antiquity, snakes were really prized as animals that... that were kind of messengers and intermediaries between humans and nature. They played a part in origin myths in ancient Egypt, for example.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
They're associated with healing in ancient Greece. In Mesoamerica, they were these intermediary animals that could pass between the living world and the afterworld and also were harbingers of essentially associated with meteorological powers like rain, storms, lightning, all of which were ultimately attached to agricultural fertility and even more ultimately to survival.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
So, as a symbolic animal, they've always been a creature that humans have had a sort of special relationship with.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It's a very complicated process. It involves a lot of tendons, a lot of muscle contractions, using muscles to push against the surface that they're navigating on. And this coordinated activity with all these contractions and muscle activity allows them to navigate a vastly different number of terrains.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
So one of the interesting things that came up with researchers who were studying locomotion is that for most terrestrial animals, presumably including humans, when you encounter a cluttered obstacle-strewn landscape, you have to sort of slow down to pick your way through it. With snakes, it's exactly the opposite. They can push against obstacles.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
They use obstacles as a way to accelerate and actually go faster. I think it's a great kind of metaphoric testament to their ability and quality of taking what would normally be an an adverse situation and turning it into a competitive advantage, as it were. Again, they're very shrewd animals that are able to use what's confronting them in the environment to their advantage.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Most snakes prefer to have nothing to do with humans or other animals. Given a choice, they would just disappear into the brush. And it's an interesting question about whether the fear is justified. It depends on where you live. In the United States, the number of people who die from a snake bite, minimal. It's roughly five people a year. In India, nearly 60,000 people a year die from snake bite.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
So it's a very... dire public health issue there. In fact, Kofi Annan, who used to be the Secretary General of the United Nations, once said that snake bite is the most significant tropical disease you've never heard of. It kills about 138,000 people a year in the world, mostly in rural and poor areas. So if you're in a developing country, the fear is extremely legitimate.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
In the United States, we're very adept at taking care of people who have been bitten by snakes, and that's why the number of fatalities is so low. I was actually curious to compare it to other forms of, you know, unfortunate death. You know, lightning causes 28 deaths a year on average. Bee stings, like 70 or so deaths a year. Accidental falls cause 44,000 deaths a year, snake bites roughly five.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
So the fear, at least in a developed country with good medical care, it's kind of out of proportion to the actual actuarial risk, if you will.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
A rattlesnake is a pit viper, and the rattles are attached at the end of the tail. They are added with each shedding of skin. And it doesn't actually sound like a rattle. It's a little bit, I liken it a little bit more to almost like a cicada's sound. It's more of a buzz than a rattle.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
I actually attended a workshop for rattlesnake handling in California in the course of my research, and it was really interesting to be in the position of picking up a rattlesnake with tongs, but being able to handle it and see in many ways that there was no aggressiveness, there was no attempt to bite or anything like that.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
One of the new technologies that's not that new anymore that's changed our perception of snakes is radio transmitters because they were injected into or inserted into rattlesnakes and it allowed researchers to follow individual snakes because each snake was tagged with a particular frequency and could be distinguished.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And in the course of doing this, they began to realize that rattlesnakes have social behavior. The mothers stay with their young following birth. Some snakes are kind of chill, if you will. They don't rattle even if you get close to them. Others are a little bit more anxious and rattle when you're still quite far away. Some of them like to hang out with other snakes and avoid other snakes.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
There's a sociality that was never understood because we didn't have the technology to see it. But once we begin to see individual snakes, we can begin to see these different behaviors.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Exactly. It's a warning. It's an alert. If you're getting too close, I'm sensing threat. And again, the snakes are not being aggressive in seeking people out. They're kind of warning you that you're getting close to them and they might perceive that as a threat. Now there's a fascinating anecdote from, it's almost a century now, of a woman named Grace Olive Wiley.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And she was a librarian in Minneapolis who liked snakes, and she collected lots of snakes, and she bred snakes, including rattlesnakes. And she had such a large collection that she was ultimately invited to be a curator of reptiles at the Brookfield Zoo, which is right outside Chicago.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
But she had a habit of kind of letting venomous snakes kind of circulate and, quote, escape from their cages in the zoo, in the reptile house, and consequently was fired.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
But she had this theory that snakes were so chemosensitive, and that is that they recognized chemical signatures so acutely that if she threw clothes that she had worn and had washed into the cages of snakes when they arrived, venomous snakes, that they would become habituated to her scent and would not perceive her as a threat. And then she went on to freehandle these very venomous snakes.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
We're talking about rattlesnakes, cobras. And there are pictures of her practically nuzzling these serpents, you know, wrapping them around her neck, holding them without a problem. she ultimately succumbed to the bite of a cobra that had not been habituated in the same way.
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Now, a lot of people think that she was kind of a little bit off the mark in terms of her knowledge, but when I mention this to people who are experts in chemosensation in reptiles now, they actually surprise me by saying, you know, that's actually entirely possible because these animals have such an acute sense of chemical perception
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
that they might well recognize a scent as being associated with another animal that is a human that's not threatening. So that was pretty surprising to me. And it talks, it speaks to this incredible chemical acuity that these animals have.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Are they, yeah, how smart are they? Well, I think you could say that they learn. There was a scientific group actually in Brooklyn in the 1970s that had snakes running simple mazes. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. Apart from intelligence, one of the most interesting qualities from the point of view of their brains is that all their sensory inputs arrive in the visual center of the reptile brain.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It's called the optic tectum. And what that suggests, although it hasn't been sufficiently investigated, is that snakes are examples of synesthesia. That is, you know, they have this ability to sort of taste colors or smell touches, that sort of thing, where they conflate senses because they all come to the same place.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It's not like different parts of the brain are talking to other different parts of the brain. It all gets melded into one kind of sensory map of the outer world. And that's a really incredible notion to ponder. That's a completely different sensation of the external world than anything we can possibly imagine. And it's pretty interesting.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Nope. And some of them engage in parthenogenesis. In other words, they create clones of themselves without a sexual partner. So it's asexual reproduction. This actually gets to one of the more interesting aspects of snakes, according to this genomic scientist I spoke to then at Harvard. But he's just saying that snakes kind of break all the rules.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Some of them lay eggs, some of them have live birth. Their chromosome structure is some of them resemble dogs and birds and others resemble mammals. Some of them eat once a day, some of them eat once a year. In other words, there's just this terrific variation in terms of biological mechanisms and processes, reproduction being one of them, that They don't follow the rules.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Well, snakes shed their skin after a certain period of time. It varies between species. But the skin starts to get a little bit fuzzy and duller. And then they basically find a sharp object like a rock. and from head to toe just kind of wriggle out of their old skin and suddenly it's like you just bought a new suit.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It looks absolutely pristine and beautiful and because of this color variation in stakes, they look absolutely great.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
The flip side of that, and again this has just emerged in the last couple of years, is you can tell these sort of evolutionary stories where snakes have independently evolved the exact same qualities even though they share no common ancestry and no common lineage. There was an article in Science a couple years ago that looked at three different types of spitting cobras.
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
These are cobras who actually spit their venom. They don't bite you, but they spit it. They evolved in completely different places. They independently evolved the anatomy that allowed them to spit as opposed to bite. They independently evolved the behavior to spit specifically at the eyes of something that was threatening them, only at the eyes.
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
And they specifically and independently evolved venoms that contained a component that caused excruciating eye pain. So, they all started in different places at different times and yet they arrived at the same kind of solution to the problem of a threat.
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It's really fascinating that as an example of what's called convergent evolution, which is different species in different places end up looking or doing things that are quite similar just because it's an advantage to develop those qualities.
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
i wanted to ask you about snakes as pets i know people sometimes have snakes as pets but what kind of pets are they do i mean do they have personalities if you talk to people who have snakes or study snakes they will tell you that they have distinct personalities i had a number of people researchers up to including rattlesnakes that they have personalities some of them are kind of ornery
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Some of them are very calm. There's a term in herpetology as ambassador snakes, and it's basically a snake that's very docile. It's not going to bite, easily handled, doesn't mind being handled. You know, they take them to schools and for parties and birthday parties and things like that because they're totally normal.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
Children and people are fascinated by the fact that these animals do have personalities and some of them are very calm and easy to handle and kind of curious. When I was in Florida, we were looking for pythons, and we found this sort of a baby blue racer.
Something You Should Know
Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
But the person I was with, a woman python hunter, in fact, you know, just scratching the snake under its chin, and it was just moving its head around looking at it. It was kind of curious, actually. Yeah. This idea of them being inert, asocial animals is really not correct at all. And if you talk to anyone who owns a snake, they'll tell you that they really become habituated to their owners.
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Why Revenge Is Seldom Worth It & What You Need to Know About Snakes
It depends on where you live. In the United States, it's roughly five people a year die from snakebite. In India, nearly 60,000 people die from snakebite. So it's a very dire public health issue there.