Bitten by a Beaked Snake

Nevit Dilmen/Creative Commons



by guest writer James Smith






My last name—Smith—is, according to at least one study, the
most common in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia (and the
fifth most common in Ireland, apparently, even if you don’t count MacGowan or
MacGovan, the Gaelic equivalent.) No doubt this was due to the fact that smiths
were in demand in early communities, and to be known as a smith was a mark of
honor—they made weapons, jewelry, cookware, horse tack, all those things you
couldn’t live without in the old days. And just as Smith was popular in
English-speaking lands, so its German analogue, Schmidt, caught on like
wildfire in German-speaking countries.




In other words, Dr. Karl P. Schmidt, may he rest in peace,
and yours truly are connected at least in so far as we share, to all intents
and purposes, a surname. That proved a trifle disconcerting to me one summer
evening about ten years ago, for, during the course of maintaining my reptile
collection, I found myself in eerily similar circumstances to those which
brought the good doctor’s career to an unpleasant and untimely halt in the year
1957.




Look through a book of snakes and you’ll find some with
weird names—yamakagashi, mamba, cribo, mussurana, daboia. But my favorite is
the boomslang. This word is taken from the Afrikaans for “tree snake” and
that’s just what the boomslang is, a medium-sized arboreal snake that feeds on
small mammals, lizards and birds in the savanna woodlands of its native Africa.
Boomslangs are rear-fanged snakes, snakes with enlarged, grooved rear teeth instead
of the needle-like front fangs of vipers and cobras. (Purists dislike
“rear-fanged” as a nonscientific, artificial catch-all, but since it provides a
ready illustration and when you say “opistoglyphous” people tend to say
“Gesundheit!” by way of reply, rear-fanged it is.) To deliver a significant
dose of venom, most rear-fangs have to really clamp on and work their jaws,
almost chewing, to ensure the toxin runs down the grooves into the wound.




Due to this somewhat crude means of venom delivery, the majority
of rear-fanged snakes are basically harmless. Many are small reptiles about the
size of the garter snakes commonly found throughout North America, and their
mouths too small to bring their awkwardly-placed fangs into play. Even with
some of the big ones, such as the beautiful mangrove snake from Thailand and
Indonesia, their venom is generally negligible with regard to its effect on
anything much larger than the animals they feed on—lizards, birds, mice, other
snakes—and sometimes not especially effective even on these, stunning or
sedating rather than killing outright.




To be sure, even these snakes should be treated with utmost
care and respect, since much depends on the chemistry of the person bitten, and
it’s a poor way to find out that you’re hypersensitive to this or that protein
or enzyme. But in general, rear-fanged snakes are not in a league with their
front-fanged counterparts—atractaspids, elapids and viperids—either in delivery
or weapons-grade venom.




The boomslang is a very unpleasant exception.




In 1957, Karl P. Schmidt, curator of reptiles at the Field
Museum in Chicago, was bitten by a juvenile boomslang he was identifying for a
colleague and succumbed to internal bleeding twenty-eight hours later. Death by
boomslang bite, incidentally, is a horrible way to die: the haemotoxic
component acts as an anticoagulant, and in acute cases the victim may bleed
from every bodily orifice—mouth, nose, eyes, anus and privates.




Nobody had taken the boomslang seriously because of its
allegedly low toxicity and inefficient venom delivery, and so no antivenin
existed for its bite, and it would be years in the making. Thankfully, in the
wild boomslangs are shy and hardly ever bite humans, though it has happened
since Dr. Schmidt’s death, usually when someone is climbing a tree and not
watching where they put their hands.  




In 1975, the African twig snake, another supposedly harmless
rear-fang, bit Robert Mertens, a German herpetologist, and killed him. Now at
least two rear-fanged snakes were proven menaces, albeit not in the wild as
much as in captivity when being handled or examined. (Mertens was hand-feeding
his twig snake when the bite took place.)




A Japanese snake called the yamakagashi, a distant cousin of
the garter snakes and only about three or four feet long, killed a young man in
the early 1980’s. While I can’t substantiate any other fatalities, numerous
other people bitten by this snake report fever, nausea and severe pain in the
joints near the bitten area. It seems prudent, then, to not dismiss the young
man’s death as a fluke and to regard the yamakagashi with the respect due a
potentially deadly snake.




Current studies suggest that quite a few snakes commonly
thought of as nonvenomous, like the garter snakes, actually have proteins in
their saliva, which aid in sedating or stunning struggling prey such as frogs
and lizards. Technically, one could argue that this means they bear at least
the evolutionary beginnings of venom. However, these snakes really pose no
threat to human safety. Indeed, most rear-fangs don’t even legally qualify as
venomous snakes—that is, they are not prohibited in areas where the ownership
of truly venomous ones, such as vipers and cobras, is restricted to licensed
owners. This is presumably because their venom is not of medical significance.
(The hognose, for instance, is a popular pet snake that happens to be
rear-fanged.)




I had worked with hognoses, and kept golden tree snakes (an
Asian rear-fang that belongs to the group known as “flying snakes” due to its
ability to flatten out and parasail, as it were, from one perch to another) but
my Karl Schmidt moment arose at the fangs of a rufous beaked snake, acquired in
the summer of 2002.




Rufous beaked snakes are long, slim brownish snakes with a
black mask on their eyes, almost like a raccoon’s. Very alert and responsive
animals (for snakes), they are almost birdlike in the way they move their heads
while taking notice of everything outside their cages, and perform a curious
self-anointing ritual involving nasal secretions—known as “scale polishing” and
still poorly understood, perhaps an adaptation designed to guard against losing
moisture—that is downright comical to watch. Found in semi-arid to almost
desert regions of southern Africa, they make engaging captives, and are extremely
reluctant to bite in self-defense.




So how, then, did I get bitten?




I violated a fundamental snake-keeper’s rule: don’t
interfere with a snake when he’s having dinner.




I was feeding my specimen a frozen-thawed mouse. I usually
do not offer live prey due to the risk of a mouse or rat getting off one last
lucky shot with those long teeth, so frozen is easier on the snake, more
convenient for me, and—while the rodent is still dead (carbon dioxide gas)—it
is spared the sensation of being stalked by a predator. The snake appeared not
to notice the inert mouse. I went to reach for my feeding tongs, which normally
hung on a peg beside this snake’s terrarium.




They weren’t there.




I was impatient and didn’t want to bother looking around.
Reaching into the cage with fingers that smelled of mouse and were moving, I
went to jiggle the dead rodent with my bare hand. There was a sudden flash of
brown and the snake clamped his jaws on my right ring finger at the second
knuckle. Because beaked snakes rely primarily on constriction to kill and their
bite as more or less of a sedative, a secondary measure, he threw a coil around
my wrist and anchored himself.




Now, a few things are necessary to explain here. Like the
boomslang, the beaked snake can open its jaws quite wide—perhaps not as far as
the one hundred seventy-degree gape of the boomslang, but wide enough. Due to
its short head, those rear fangs are rear in name only: while they are
certainly not at the front of the mouth, like those of a viper or cobra, and
they are the crude, grooved back teeth, not the precision hypodermics of the
front-fanged species, they are decent-sized and forward-directed.




And “not dangerous” does not equate to “not painful.” A
single white-faced hornet is not dangerous, unless you are one of those
unfortunate folks who suffer from allergies to their stings—but anyone who has
ever experienced a white-face on the attack, where the insect darts like a
guided missile to turn at impact and strike sting-first—and how she can
sting!—will tell you that the pain inflicted is excruciating.




Almost as soon as the snake’s jaws closed, I became aware of
a stabbing, burning pain in my finger. I’ve been bitten by tarantulas and wolf
spiders, stung by hornets, bees and harvester ants, jabbed by the spines of
catfish—the best comparison I could make was to a pair of acid-coated thorns
being shoved into my flesh.




At this point the snake became aware that he’d grabbed me
instead of a mouse, and that I was too big to swallow. Unsettled by the whole
thing, he released his hold and slipped into his cave at the end of the tank,
to the accompaniment of some very blasphemous language.




My finger was burning, reddening, and starting to swell. I
sat down to take stock of the situation. On the one hand, if beaked snakes
couldn’t even kill a mouse with their bite, and required constriction to kill
their prey, I was probably safe.




On the other hand, poisons are funny—the toxic agent in the
beaked snake’s bite, rufoxin, certainly did incapacitate prey, I had seen that with
my own eyes before getting this one conditioned to take dead mice. (I was later
to learn that it induces hypotension and circulatory shock, in fact, doubtless
rendering the mouse easier to constrict.)




And of course, some irrational part of my mind gibbered, the
boomslang had been thought harmless…until Dr. Schmidt went to that giant
reptile house in the sky.




Realistically, I was pretty much screwed if I turned out to
be the first case of serious beaked snake envenomation. Since they were
theoretically harmless, there would have been no serum to treat the bite and
you can’t, for example, inject someone with rattlesnake antivenin and hope for
the best (you can kill someone by using the wrong antivenin—and some people
cannot process it anyway, so doctors who truly know snakebite tend to see it as
one option among others, although if it can be administered safely, a good one.)
When it became apparent that my gums had not started to bleed after twenty
minutes, and a quick check of my jockeys established that I was not leaking
blood anywhere else, I decided I wasn’t going to die and turned in for the
night, leaving the thawed mouse in the terrarium.




It was gone in the morning, and since I’m writing this, you
know I obviously wasn’t. Apart from the spot where the snake’s teeth had
actually gone in, I was perfectly normal and had no complaints. My finger did
remain stiff, sore and difficult to fully straighten for a couple of months.
Eventually it returned to normal, however.




From my later studies on the topic, I appear to simply have
an unusual degree of sensitivity to rufoxin, as other people who have been
bitten report no pain or swelling, not even locally. I still maintain my rufous
beaked snakes, and due to their extreme reluctance to bite, continue to handle
them when lecturing with them, or moving them from cage to cage. But when
feeding time rolls around, I accord them the respect due a western diamondback
in shedding time, and don’t try to rush them over their dinners.