- 5 weeks ago
Reptile expert Frank Burbrink joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about snakes.
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00:00Oh buddy, I got you out of an egg, fool. Now you're a superstar.
00:03I'm Frank Burbrink, curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History.
00:08I'm here to answer your questions from the internet. This is Snake Support.
00:16At Loba Hardy asks, why do snakes do that thing with their tongue? And I think
00:21what Loba Hardy means is why are they flicking their tongue out? If you look at this snake's
00:26tongue, you can see that it's bifurcated. There's two parts, one long part here,
00:30one long part here. And what they're doing is sensing all the chemicals in the room.
00:35Is there predators around? Are there prey around? Are there potentially mates around?
00:40So the reason that they have this forked tongue is it allows them to get comparative information.
00:44So if on, let's say the left side, the scents are stronger, then they would know to move in that
00:49direction. And the more nervous they are, the more upset they are, you're going to see them
00:52flick the tongue more often. At Anthony Avec H asks, what's the most venomous snake?
00:58That's the Inland Taipan. And the way they measure it is they look at how much venom it takes
01:03to kill the prey. So the weight of the venom versus the weight of the prey. This is the most
01:08venomous snake on the planet Earth. It's found in Australia, but it's not the one that kills the
01:12most people. So roughly 100,000, 100,000 plus people die a year from venomous snake bites,
01:18with 40 to 50,000 of those occurring in India. But most of the people in India that are dying
01:25from venomous snake bites are being bitten by things called saw-scaled vipers, Russell's vipers,
01:31Indian cobras. These venomous snakes tend to occur in agricultural fields and around homes.
01:37They're necessary. We need them there because if you don't have them, then the fields get overrun
01:41in rodents and pests. But they do pose quite a danger to the population, especially if you're not
01:46wearing shoes. They're not aggressive, but they're numerous. And if you step on them or roll on them,
01:50you're going to probably get bitten.
01:52At Old Dreams Die asks, would you know what to do if a rattlesnake was in front of you?
01:57Do you like scream at it? Do you rattle back? If you see a rattlesnake in front of you,
02:02you should first off feel very lucky that you're seeing it. You should just step back,
02:07mellow out, calm down. It's not going to do anything. People will say snakes are aggressive.
02:12They're defensive if they feel threatened, but that rattlesnake is not just going to come up and
02:16attack you, especially if you leave it alone. Give it a wide berth, walk around it and keep going.
02:22The rattle noise is to warn predators or anything that it finds threatening. Hey,
02:26I'm right here. I have venom. It could also be distracting away from its head and it's formed as
02:31overlapping little pieces of keratin. These little blocks of keratin are connected and overlap. And then
02:39when the snake has with using these special muscles move its tail, these interlocking pieces of keratin
02:47make this great rattle noise. And if this were on a living rattlesnake, they can make it much louder
02:52than I can with just this. And they kind of do it in a figure eight too. And they can
02:56keep that going.
02:57Like if you're sitting there staring and there's one that's very upset, they can keep this going for
03:0120 or 30 minutes. It's funny. There's other snakes that aren't rattlesnakes and aren't dangerously venomous
03:07that can blow air through their upper glottis and make this sound through their mouth. The theory
03:12is they're trying to mimic rattlesnakes. It's actually kind of frightening when you step on
03:16those and you hear that noise and you're like, oh no, it's not even a rattlesnake.
03:24Statuscap5979 says, how do snakes lay eggs? Like, do they have a, you know what? All snakes have this
03:29structure here, which is called a cloaca. And it's where all of their reproduction action happens. It's where
03:35feces, urine, and whatnot, that all comes out in one single opening. In this case, the eggs would
03:41be coming out of this species. The cloaca is Latin for sewer, appropriately named. And by the way,
03:46not all snakes lay eggs. This snake does, this black Mexican kingsnake. But boa constrictors,
03:53they have live babies. North American water snakes have live babies. And it can be environmentally
03:58dependent as well. If you live in very harsh environments, you're going to tend to have live
04:03babies. So you can shuttle them around and keep them in warm areas. So to tell if your snake is
04:08a
04:08male or a female, the one easy way is male snakes have hemipenes. These are reproductive organs that are
04:16stored deflated inside the tail. And they have two of them, a hemipenis on each side. So it's like a
04:22half a
04:22penis. Each side is a half a penis. When the male snake wants to reproduce, those hemipenes are inflated
04:28and one side is inserted into the female snake. And then sperm runs through these canals or channels
04:34on the outside of the penis into the oviducts of the female. And the female can do one of two
04:40things.
04:40It can be fertilized right then and start producing babies, shell eggs, or have the live birth eggs, or
04:46they can store it in special tubules. And so females can store sperm for many years. Sometimes people
04:53will get snakes from the wild and keeping them in captivity for nature shows and stuff and come in
04:57one day and all of a sudden find a whole bunch of babies in the cage of which the animal
05:01was never
05:02paired with another male. Likely because it's been storing sperm for that period of time. And females,
05:08they just discovered, have two clitoris. So they have a hemiclitoris. What's up, dude? Don't open that cloaca.
05:14From the snake subreddit, how accurate is the rhyme, red touches black, venom lack,
05:20red touches yellow, bite a fellow? Well, my little friend here, Buddy the milk snake,
05:25is going to help us answer that. Red touches black, venom lack. Yeah, sure that works in this milk
05:30snake. So we know he is not the venomous coral snake of which he's supposedly mimicking. But if you get
05:37this poem mixed up and like, you know, red touches yellow, friend of a fellow, you're going to die,
05:43right? But they're also not that helpful in Central and South America. Because sometimes you have
05:48venomous snakes that are just bi-colored that only have two colors. So that poem could get you killed.
05:53Best thing to do, folks. If you don't know what it is, don't mess with it. At Third Eye Flow
05:58asks,
05:59apparently snakes have skeletons. I thought they were just strings of meat. Well, let's look at our
06:05skeletonized gaboon viper. I see lots of bones. They have massive skeletons, definitely more vertebrae,
06:12with these ribs connected than human beings have. These awesome, fairly kinetic skulls,
06:17meaning some of the pieces of the skulls can move independently. This snake species from Africa has
06:23the largest fangs of any venomous snake. And what you can see is this snake has its backup fangs,
06:29its replacement fangs coming here. Snakes have a little ligament between the jaw bones,
06:33and that ligament allows their jaws to separate. So when they're eating something like a big prey,
06:38they can move it in and sort of walk over the prey. And these little teeth allow the snake to
06:43hold on to prey, and they're recurved, so they're curved inward towards the mouth so that the prey
06:48can't go back out easily. And then these guys, the viperids, have this modified maxilla, a small little
06:55bone with a swiveling fang on the end of it. And that fang is attached by a duck to the
07:00venom gland,
07:01and operates like a hypodermic needle, injecting venom into its prey. This is the anaconda, and you can
07:06see these four rows of teeth here on the maxilla, the palatine. And these are fantastically large and
07:13sharp for holding prey, bringing prey in. So snakes have a lot of bones, and they have very specialized bones.
07:20At Heelhound asks, if there are no dangerous snakes in New England, what snake could they be referencing
07:25with the don't tread on me reframe? Ah, but there are venomous snakes in New England. So we have
07:31copperheads, and we have timber rattlesnakes. And if you look at that animal on the don't tread me
07:35flag, you see a nice rattle, and you know that that has to be a timber rattlesnake.
07:42Jurassic Patek asks, how many species of snakes are there on the earth, and how many are currently
07:47serving in the United States Senate? Well, I'm not going to comment about the United States Senate.
07:52But living species, as of today, there's 4,229 species found on every continent except for
08:00Antarctica, and they're also found in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. And pretty much
08:06wherever you live, you're going to have a few species of snakes around you, whether you know it
08:10or not. Snakes are lizards. They are part of a group of lizards that lost their limbs. Lizards
08:16and snakes compose around 11,000 species on the planet earth. There's many other kinds of
08:22limbless lizards. They still have eyelids, but they're completely limbless. Why would something
08:27lose its limbs? How is that even an advantage? Around, you know, 160 some million years ago,
08:33snakes, which when you would have considered them lizards, probably were either burrowing under the
08:38ground and having limbs while you burrow makes it much more difficult to burrow, or in aquatic
08:43situations in the water. But what's really cool is not all snakes have lost their limbs. So,
08:49I have precious moments here, our lab ball python. There's these little spurs right here
08:55at the base of the tail, and these spurs are the remnants of a femur. A lot of the ancient
09:01fossil
09:01snakes have limbs. Pachyracis, Nagish, all these ancient snakes back in the Cretaceous, but they're
09:07generally only the rear limbs. At the Chris Pringle asked snake experts, which movie actually got snakes
09:14right? Snakes on a plane, Anaconda, or Indiana Jones? So first, let's talk about snakes on a plane. In the
09:21scene that we're watching here, there's a whole bunch of different species of snakes. What's very odd is
09:26they're attacking people in mass, spitting venom, and some spitting cobras can spit venom, and they're
09:32actually quite good at spitting venom towards your eye. But it's a mess. A lot of these do not look
09:37real. They have color patterns I've never seen before. There's some things that look like a gaboon viper,
09:42but not quite. They have the wrong teeth. Snakes want to do three things. They want to be left alone.
09:47They
09:47want to breed. And they want to eat. The way to solve this problem would be just to sit the
09:53F down and be
09:54really, really calm and still, and probably nothing would happen to you. All right, next let's talk
09:59about Anaconda. And I've got a bit of experience catching some Anacondas. This Anaconda has so much
10:06strength. It's using its tail to knock people in the water. It's standing up. It's leaping at people.
10:12It has an incredible awareness of its surrounding and of each individual person on this cast. Anacondas
10:19eat crocodilians and things like that. They're not going to eat people. Reticulated pythons have been
10:23known to eat people. Small people. This is ridiculous. Okay, let's talk about this scene
10:28from Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark. That tomb is filled with tons and tons of snakes.
10:34Some of these are not snakes. Some of them have ear holes and eyelids, so they're legless lizards.
10:40Maybe somebody on the set didn't really like snakes. There are snakes that do not occur there. I think
10:45there was just a boa, which is only found in the New World. There are areas of the world where
10:50snakes
10:50hibernate together. It's actually called brumation. You can get copperheads or rattlesnakes or rat
10:56snakes all denning in these areas over winter. You're not going to find cobras with boas in the
11:01same region. Yeah, it's pretty fabricated. Sorry.
11:06Atrazil asks, can snakes see farts? Well, some snakes can see infrared. That is heat signature. So I would
11:13guess they could probably see farts. I don't know what they would do with that, but they probably can
11:18see them. Most snakes do not see an infrared. It's generally only pythonids and boads and pit vipers
11:26that do that. Some snakes like precious moments here. If you look at her labial scales, those are the
11:31scales on the lips. There's these little pits in there. There's a membrane inside there, and that
11:36membrane is suspended in air, and it detects slight changes in heat. And that membrane then converts the
11:43heat signal to a signal into the neuron, and then the brain converts that into an image. In pit vipers,
11:49like rattlesnakes and copperheads, they develop a single pit, hence the name pit viper, between their eye
11:55and nostril. These snakes are probably seeing normal light images filtered through how their eyes work,
12:01and then they're also getting a map of sort of the heat signatures around. And the reason they want to
12:06know what the world looks like in terms of infrared is to detect prey, right? So these guys are mostly
12:12going to be eating warm-blooded prey, so mammals or birds. You know, a mammal or a bird is going
12:17to light up to
12:17this animal, like massively. At Joe Say wants to know, bruv, snakes are mad. They can swim and walk,
12:24but don't have legs or fins. WTF El Diablo. The way most people see snakes when you see them moving
12:31and
12:31slithering really fast, that's called undulatory movement. They kind of make a wave that goes down
12:36the body, and that wave feels different parts of the roughness of the ground and pushes off on that,
12:40and it happens so fast it looks like an illusion. They have a concertina way of moving, which is it's
12:47kind
12:47like an accordion where they're all bunched up at one part, stretch their head up, and then pull their
12:52back of their body. They can sidewind on sand, where they're mostly in the air, limiting contact
12:57with the body in just little small parts. They have a rectilinear motion, which you see in big
13:03pythonids and boas, where they use their belly muscles to pull themselves forward. But they also
13:07swim with this undulatory movement. They can glide. They don't have powered flight, but they can jump out of
13:13trees, open up their ribs, and kind of glide. Chrysopelia in Southeast Asia can do this.
13:19So they have many ways of moving without limbs. Snakes can be pretty fast in short bursts of motion,
13:26like, you know, moving at around 18 miles per hour, but they're generally not sustained long
13:31runners or anything like that. And snakes like ball pythons or rattlesnakes, which are sit and wait
13:37predators, they're extremely slow. Slow moving, except they can do one thing really fast, and that is strike.
13:45Okay, Drawing Mentally wants to know, what's the difference between poisonous and venomous?
13:49If you bite it and you get sick, that's poisonous. If it bites you and you get sick, that's venomous.
13:55So basically, poisonous are toxic chemicals that are passively on the organism, such that if you
14:03bother them, put them in your mouth, you'll get sick. Venomous animals have a delivery system, like
14:07fangs and a gland that secretes venom onto those fangs. All snakes are part of a group of snakes
14:14and lizards called Toxicophera, and that group has the ability to make venom. Snakes that eat worms
14:21or insects, they're not going to develop any kind of dangerous venoms, but ones that eat mammals can
14:26develop these venoms. That's going to be rattlesnakes, cobras, copperheads, coral snakes.
14:32That's not the only strategy to subdue prey. You can grab prey, constrict them, but there's one snake
14:37or one genus of snake called Rhabdophus that you can find in Asia, and that snake is very odd because
14:42it eats toads. The toads have poisons, these toxins. The snake sequesters them in an organ on their neck,
14:49such that when you're to grab that snake, it will push its neck on you to try to get the
14:54toad toxins
14:55on you, so you let it go, which is kind of interesting because they are rear fanged and
14:59they do have venom, but they rarely ever bite. At HellsWillRoll82 asks, can a snake bite your butt
15:06when you're on the toilet? It comes up via the U-Bend. Hmm. There have been reports of snakes coming
15:12up through toilets. I've seen them. I've had friends that have had snakes coming up into the toilets.
15:17Theoretically, they've moved through openings in the pipe external and then come up through that into the
15:21toilet. And just last year, a friend of mine, a curator here, had a racer in her toilet in Savannah,
15:26Georgia and was asking what to do. And I was like, well, just leave the toilet lid open and it'll
15:32eventually get out of there because there's not going to be any food that it wants in the toilet.
15:35And that would be an animal. If you sat down on top of it, you would get a butt bite
15:39from that thing.
15:40I would feel like I won the lottery, but I think most people would be pretty upset by that.
15:46Weird Look has a question. What is your craziest, scariest snake story?
15:49I work on the genetics and genomics and evolution of snakes and taxonomy, how they're named,
15:55finding new species. And to do this, I have to cover the world and go into really remote places
16:01and forests and live out there and work with my team members and going out day and night and
16:06catching snakes and drawing blood and DNA out of them to understand their evolutionary history.
16:12My team and the people that I work with were some of the last of the explorers of remote parts
16:17of the world to do this kind of research. My main area is South America, occasionally Madagascar.
16:23We just got back from a big collecting trip to American Samoa, which was pretty remote. Oddly enough,
16:29in South America, some of the most common snakes we find are these venomous snakes, and they generally
16:35go by their genus named Bothrops. And these venomous snakes are absolutely everywhere. Their taxonomy is not
16:41well worked out. But that's your guarantee when you're out in the field in Brazil, which is pretty
16:46remarkable. I've only had one time where I was bitten through a cloth bag by a copperhead when I was
16:52young on this finger, my ring finger, but it didn't put any venom in the fang. So I drew a
16:56lucky card
16:57on that one. So I have never been envenomated. I've been bitten by thousands of non-venomous snakes.
17:03That's just part of doing the work. Last year, I caught an anaconda. That's fine. We do those sorts of
17:08things. But it's usually the human interactions that happen out in the field. Being shot a couple
17:13of times, that's a pretty crazy story when I was looking for snakes. But as I'm pointing out,
17:18the snakes themselves, I love them to death. I'm excited to see them. I'm happy to see them.
17:22So they don't seem like crazy stories. They seem like my normal day.
17:26At TNT Gal asks, why do cobras have hoods? Well, this strange curio from the old curio shop days,
17:33not part of our collection, shows you this nice hood. So why does this have this large
17:38hood? It makes the animal look bigger, makes it more intimidating to predators.
17:43The other idea is that it could be honest signaling, which is,
17:46I'm venomous, F around and find out. But also these patterns on the back of the neck present
17:51as potentially distracting or eye spots or something that would ward off a predator from
17:56coming from the back. And since we're talking about cobras, I think a lot of people's association
18:02with them are watching videos of snake charmers. And these are generally guys that are playing some
18:06kind of flute in front of the cobra and moving around. The cobra is not hearing that noise.
18:11They do have an ear, but they generally hear through their jaws. The flute is bothering the
18:15snake. It's moving around. It feels threatened. And so it's trying to negotiate what's happening.
18:21It's not sitting there listening to a good tune and, you know, rocking back and forth with that.
18:26Nate Nandoz 21 asks, why do snakes shed their skin? Well, as opposed to the way humans do,
18:32where we just have this turning over of skin snakes, skin that's mainly keratinized,
18:37like our fingernails or hair, as the snake grows that outer layer, that skin doesn't grow with them.
18:42They have a hormonal response that develops this new epithelial layer and separates that from the
18:48old skin with this lymph fluid between the old skin and the new skin beneath it. That lymph fluid makes
18:54them look cloudy. So when they're going to shed their skin, their eyes are all cloudy. They have
18:58a difficult sink. They tend to retire and not be out as much. And then eventually,
19:03as those two layers have really separated from each other, the snake will come out,
19:07rub its nose on a rock or a rough surface and crawl out of its own skin, leaving it like
19:12a
19:13inside out sock. Duck EXES, Mexican Black Kingsnake versus California Kingsnake. They're both gorgeous.
19:20You know, the Mexican Black Kingsnake's all black, beautiful snake. California Kings come in a whole bunch
19:26of patterns of black and white bands or stripes. All so beautiful. To pick between those two,
19:32it's like asking which of my kids are my favorite. I don't have a favorite. I love them all.
19:36King snakes, as a group, have the ability to eat venomous snakes. So they can eat rattlesnakes,
19:42they can eat copperheads. And when they're bitten by those venomous snakes, they don't really suffer
19:47from that. They have an ability to neutralize those venoms. And this is a project that I'm actually
19:52working on right now. What are all the proteins that allow them to survive these rattlesnake bites?
19:58In the old days, farmers used to like these guys because they would, you know, keep the venomous
20:03snakes under control. And there's a lot of snakes on the planet that eat venomous snakes. And generally,
20:08people working in agriculture in those areas, like in South America, will know which ones are eating
20:13the venomous snakes and generally not harm them. From Noodles BLEP,
20:17what's your dream snake? Well, my dream snake can be represented right here in this cast. And this is
20:24a Spilodes pulatus, which is a Central and South American tiger snake. These get very, very big,
20:30incredibly fast on the ground. You often find them high up in trees. A lot of people, I think,
20:35believe snakes hang out on the ground or in water and stuff. These guys are super arboreal,
20:41but they can come to the ground. They inflate their necks when they're scared. And they also will not
20:46hesitate to bite you if you grab them. Beautiful animal. You're very lucky if you see this animal.
20:52Salmon Sammy Sam Sam asks,
20:54Snakes are deaf, right? So how does this work? Well, that is true. Snakes don't have external ears,
20:59but they do have internal ears. And so while they generally can't hear vibrations or noises through
21:05the air, they can feel them through their jaw bones. There is some evidence that they might be able
21:10to detect some heavy vibrations in the air or even along their body, but mainly it would be through
21:17their jaw bones directly to the internal ears. Medborn50 asks, What happens to the bones of animals
21:23that snakes eat? If you're going to eat a deer or you're going to eat a mouse or bird or
21:28another snake,
21:28snakes don't have limbs. They can't disassemble these animals, so they have to eat the whole animal.
21:33This requires some serious, strong digestive juices and acids that can pretty much break most things down,
21:40the bone, skin, muscle, etc. from animals. Things like hair and feathers can sometimes make it through
21:47that don't get digested. So a really large snake, it could take an incredibly long amount of time to
21:52digest, weeks to potentially a month. When they're not eating, when they're, you know, fasting, they
21:56haven't eaten a meal, most of their digestive system gets down-regulated, right? It's not being used.
22:02It gets really, really small. They don't have to consistently eat, which is a major adaptation.
22:07At Reese Clutter asks, How does antivenom even work? Venom in many species of snakes can shut down
22:13the nervous system by blocking signals between nerves and muscle. They can destroy cells, cytotoxins.
22:21They can destroy blood vessels. And one of the coolest parts is they can have anticoagulant properties.
22:27And these anticoagulant properties stop animals from clotting and causing them to bleed out and allow the venom to
22:34move through the body. So how does antivenom work? The way it's produced is you take the venom,
22:39you grab the snake's head, you'll have a little container with a rubber covering. The snake will
22:44bite that rubber covering and you can push the head down and squeeze the venom from the venom glands,
22:49the duvenoise glands, into the container. And you pump that through in low amounts through farm animals
22:56like sheep. They've been doing this for more than a hundred years. Those animals produce antibodies
23:01to the venom. You separate those antibodies and then put it into somebody who's been bitten by a snake,
23:07a venomous snake. And those antibodies stop the action of those venoms. But you can't take it as a
23:13prophylactic. You can only have it after you're bitten by a venomous snake. Throughout the United States,
23:18there's serpentariums that make them. They're made globally. Some make monovalence, which are targeted
23:23towards one species. Some makes polyvalence, where the venoms are targeted to multiple species. It's fairly
23:29costly to make. You have to house venomous snakes. You have to have staff to actually milk them,
23:34which is quite a dangerous job. It's quite an expensive process. Slow Jehovitz asks,
23:39Pythons are eating the Florida Everglades. Should we eat them instead? The Everglades have an invasive
23:45species called the Burmese python. This Burmese python numbers probably into the hundreds of thousands of
23:51individuals. And they're having a major impact on mammal fauna there. Burmese pythons can get around 15,
23:5816 feet in the max. I think there is one in Florida that was captured that was 19 feet long
24:03and a couple
24:04hundred pounds. The Florida Everglades, which are a gigantic protected park, it's an extremely unique
24:10biome. It's part of our American heritage. You cannot legally grab or anything in that park without
24:18permits. But they do have these roundups where they're trying to eliminate these animals. Some of
24:23these roundups are pretty wild. Some of the people that get the most number of snakes in a day win
24:27a
24:27pickup truck and all this kind of stuff. Southern Florida is subtropical and the subtropical habitats
24:33are good for lots of species around the world. And that's probably the main reason why Florida has
24:39more than 60 introduced reptiles. And these introduced animals may have been let out by pet people.
24:46There's been some evidence in the past that hurricanes have knocked over some of these areas that people
24:51were keeping these pets and they got out. But it's definitely a recipe for disaster if you're going
24:55to have lots of introduced exotic species that come from tropical areas of the world. So it's kind of
25:01like, you know, the cat's out of the bag. There's pretty much nothing we can do about it. So those
25:06are
25:07all the questions for today. Thanks for watching snake support.
25:14No, I only got alcohol here. During prohibition, the janitors would drink the alcohol out of the jars.
25:20When you couldn't get alcohol, man, people get pretty desperate.