Many students seem to be worried about our health and safety, for which we are very grateful. However, we want to assure everyone that we are alive and well and reasonably safe, probably safer than driving every day to work on a highway in New Jersey!
There are highly poisonous snakes here such as coral snakes, which we see only occasionally. There are also many mimics of poisonous snakes (what's a mimic?), and they are often hard to tell from the real thing. We are very careful. The only case I know of someone being bitten by a coral snake on BCI was when a herpetology student decided to photograph a coral snake that he had caught and put in a cage. The snake tried to hide its head from the bright photographic lights and the big, scary man. The man poked the snake with his finger so that it would look up and make a better picture. The snake defended itself and bit him. A medical helicopter was called and the man was taken to a hospital in Panama City. He never showed any signs of poisoning, and it appears that the snake "chose" not to inject any venom. I have seen other people bitten by very dangerous sea snakes (not on BCI) with no ill effects except that the experience was really frightening! So being bitten by a snake is not necessarily the end. Most of the snakes on BCI are not venomous or only mildly so. There are vine snakes that look like green or brown vines and even move like vines shaking in the breeze. They are very well camouflaged. They eat lizards, especially anoles, and have a mild venom (not mild to the anoles!). I have been bitten by them and had no effect. The fangs are at the rear of the mouth, not the front. There are many other species of snakes including boa constrictors, rainbow boas, and spilotes (big rat snakes).
YES, we do get tired-- to answer another frequent question. We have a goal to do at least 120 km of mammal census this season, so we do at least 5 km each day. But if we walk out from the lab to do 5 km, then we need to walk home again. We have to census in the morning between 7 am when it's just light enough to see clearly in the forest,and noon, when many animals take a siesta for the rest of the day, coming out to feed again in the late afternoon. And we do about 20 km of night census too, which is more tiring and time-consuming for each animal we find and identify (it takes longer to be sure of an identification when working at night). We went out the other night and saw 5 pacas and one porcupine (prehensile-tailed variety) in 1.4 km of walking. We were a little disappointed not to have seen any brocket deer or opossums, but sometimes that's the way things are. We will go out again tonight. YES, sometimes things scare us at night. Sometimes we hear noises that are cries of animals that are really spooky and we can't find the animals to see what they are. We'll save our stories on that for another time.
Greetings, Rainforest Folks! There have been so many questions from students about the dangers of snakes, that I thought the following story would be appropriate. This story was written by my friend Pat Detamore, who also had the pet sloth. She sent the story to me just yesterday, but the story actually happened many years ago. Pat used to live in Panama and now lives in Georgia.
"Dear Jackie,
I know that you are concentrating your observations on mammals and that snakes are not mammals, but since questions about snakes were nearly always the first ones asked whenever I returned from a jungle jaunt, I thought your students might like to hear about Alfred.
A friend and I were exploring a small island in Gatun Lake when we came across a large boa constrictor (about 6 ft. long and unusually fat) lying on the ground. Although we had spent a lot of time in Panama's forests, we had seen very few snakes, as they usually hide when they hear human footsteps approach. This one just lay quietly as we stood over it, and my friend suggested we take it home and eat it. (He had just been through a course at the Jungle Survival School and wanted to demonstrate to me that it was possible to "live off the land" if one were willing to eat some unusual foods.) "Besides," he said, "snake meat really is delicious." He sent me to cut a forked stick with my machete while he watched the snake.
As I turned away, my movement made the snake decide it ought to leave as well and it began to slither down a hole under some leaves. "Hurry up," my friend called. "It's getting away!" He grabbed the tail and held on while I searched frantically for a branch of the right size.
(I want you to know that this happened many years ago, before I learned about conservation of our environmental resources - or even about avoiding danger in the jungle. I wouldn't agree to removing a snake - or any other wild creature - from the rainforest now!)
By the time I got back with a forked stick, the snake had turned around in the burrow and poked its head out to see what was holding its tail. My friend, unwilling to let go of the tail, now grabbed the snake's neck with his other hand so as to keep from getting bitten. The stick was no longer necessary, and we put the snake into a large cloth bag that we always carried in case we found something we wanted to carry home.
By the time we reached home, it was too late in the evening to prepare the snake for cooking, so we put it alive in a box, which we stored in another friend's basement. (Neither my friend's wife nor my husband was willing to play host to that snake overnight!) Unfortunately, that friend's wife had no idea there was a snake in the box in her basement, and opened the lid when she went down to do her laundry the following morning. Imagine her astonishment (and horror) when she was greeted by a squirming mass of, not just one large angry snake, but also 52 baby snakes as well! The poor woman slammed the lid down on the box and went screaming down the street, barefoot and still in housecoat and curlers, to a neighbor's house.
When my friend and I came to collect our snake, we discarded the idea of eating it - after all, you can't eat a MOTHER. Instead, we gave the big snake to a little zoo that the Army used to show newly arrived soldiers what they might find in the jungle, and tried to find homes for the babies.
Each of the baby snakes was about 18 inches long. (Many snakes lay eggs, but boas give live birth.) We found homes for most of the babies, but my friend kept three of them and I was able to convince my husband to let me keep one. I named him Alfred.
I kept Alfred for three years. In that time he grew very rapidly because I fed him much more than he would have found to eat on his own in the jungle. He outgrew first one cage, then another. Eventually, at nearly eight feet long, he lived in a cage in my back yard until someone opened the cage and let him go. I never found out whether he had been set free or if he had been stolen to become someone else's pet."
by Pat Detamore
Today we are fortunate to have a sequel to the Alfred Snake story, which Pat Detamore sent to us. This is another true story from Panama:
I learned a lot about snakes from Alfred. But I also learned something first from his mother. I hadn't known that boas have a musk gland that can put out a really powerful scent. After my friend and I had handled her, our hands had a very strong, unpleasant odor for DAYS. No amount of washing seemed to take it away until it just wore off naturally. I have no idea what that musk is used for, but if I had been an animal looking for an easy snake meal, that smell certainly would have turned me off!
The first thing I had to learn with Alfred was what and how to feed him.
Having had no experience at all with snakes before, I talked to a biologist friend who told me that it was important that Alfred's first meal be alive, but small enough to swallow easily and not so lively that it would bite him.
"If it bites him before he's had a chance to eat, it may frighten him so that he will never eat," he told me. He recommended baby mice that were too young to have teeth, a meal that would most likely have been his first meal in the forest. The lab where the man worked was able to supply me with all the mice Alfred could eat, and he learned to love his once a week mealtimes.
I also learned that snakes have a pretty good memory. Alfred's first cage was a box with plastic window screen for the sides and part of the lid. One night he found a small tear in the screen on the lid and got out. I found the cage empty in the morning, but had no trouble finding Alfred, as he was busy trying to get into the mouse cage nearby. After repairing the hole, I put Alfred back in the cage -- and he immediately stretched himself up the wall looking for that hole!
Much later, after Alfred had outgrown that cage and another one besides, I had to be gone from home for several weeks. Although I had learned from books that snakes, boas included, can live for more than a month without eating, I did not want Alfred to go hungry. So I asked my daughter to see that he got his usual once-a-week meal of six full-grown mice. My usual method of feeding him was to give him one mouse at a time, making sure that he ate it before putting another in the cage. (I had been told that if a captive snake does not eat the mouse in his cage, the mouse may bite him and cause (at the very least) a skin infection. But my tender-hearted daughter could not bring herself to watch the snake kill and eat a mouse, so she just put all six in the cage with him.
Poor Alfred! He got so excited at having so many choices he couldn't decide which mouse to eat first. (Imagine yourself in a toy store and being told you could take anything you wanted!) As the mice wandered around the cage (no one had ever told them that snakes could be dangerous to their health), Alfred grabbed one in his mouth, but threw a coil around a different one. The mouse he had in his mouth squirmed around and bit the snake on the nose. Alfred was so shocked that he dropped both mice and rushed over to soak his nose in his water dish, then curled up in a corner with his head tucked under a coil, hoping all those nasty critters would go away. He stayed that way until my daughter took all the mice away.
She offered him a single mouse later on that day, but he went back into his corner and wouldn't touch it. He reacted the same way the next day, and for all the days I was gone from home. In fact it was a full THREE MONTHS before I could get him to eat again! I put a mouse in his cage every week during that time, but he refused to eat until hunger finally overcame his fear and he again began to eat quite normally again.
You may remember that my friend had kept three of Alfred's brothers. They traveled to the States with him when he left Panama, going first to Florida, then to Kansas, to Germany and to Georgia over a period of about six years. Two of those snakes died, leaving only one that had been named Crusher. Crusher lived to be 14 years old, but never got more than about six feet long. Why did he not grow as big as Alfred (who grew to nearly eight feet in three years)? I believe it was because he was given much less to eat - my mice were free, with an unlimited supply, while Crusher's owner had to either buy his or raise them himself (or try to catch field mice.)
Thank you, Pat.