Herpetologist Answers Snake Questions

Oh, buddy, I got you out of an egg, fool.

Now you're a superstar. [production card beeps]

I'm Frank Burbrink, Curator of Herpetology

at the American Museum of Natural History.

I'm here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Snake Support.

[upbeat drumming music]

@LobaHardy asked, Why do snakes do that thing

with their tongue?

And I think what Loba Hardy means is

why are they flicking their tongue out?

If you look at this snake's tongue,

you can see that it's bifurcated.

There's two parts, one long part here, one long part here.

And what they're doing is sensing

all the chemicals in the room.

Is there predators around? Are there prey around?

Are there potentially mates around?

So the reason that they have this forked tongue is

it allows them to get comparative information.

So if on, let's say the left side, the scents are stronger,

then they would know to move in that direction.

And the more nervous they are, the more upset they are,

you're gonna see them flick the tongue more often.

@AnthonyAvecH asked, What's the most venomous snake?

That's the Inland Taipan,

and the way they measure it is they look at

how much venom it takes to kill the prey.

So the weight of the venom versus the weight of the prey.

This is the most venomous snake on the planet Earth.

It's found in Australia,

but it's not the one that kills the most people.

So roughly 100,000,

100,000 plus people die a year from venomous snake bites

with 40 to 50,000 of those occurring in India.

But most of people in India

that are dying from venomous snake bites are being bitten

by things called saw-scaled vipers,

Russell's vipers, Indian cobras.

These venomous snakes tend to occur

in agricultural fields and around homes.

They're necessary.

We need them there because if you don't have them,

then the fields get overrun in rodents and pests,

but they do pose quite a danger to the population,

especially if you're not wearing shoes.

They're not aggressive, but they're numerous.

And if you step on them

or roll on them, [keyboard clacking]

you're gonna probably get bitten.

@olddreamsdie asked, Would you know what to do

if a rattlesnake was in front of you?

Do you like scream at it? Do you rattle back?

If you see a rattlesnake in front of you,

you should first off feel very lucky that you're seeing it.

You should just step back, mellow out, calm down.

It's not gonna do anything.

People will say snakes are aggressive.

They're defensive if they feel threatened,

but that rattlesnake's not just gonna come up

and attack you, especially if you leave it alone.

Give it a wide berth, walk around it and keep going.

The rattle noise is to warn predators

or anything that it finds threatening,

Hey, I'm right here. I have venom.

It could also be distracting away from its head

and it's formed as overlapping little pieces of keratin.

These little blocks of keratin are connected and overlap.

And then when the snake has,

with using these special muscles, move its tail,

these interlocking pieces of keratin

[tail rattling] make this great rattle noise.

And if this were on a living rattlesnake, they can make it

much louder than I can with just this.

And they kind of do it in a figure eight too.

And they can keep that going, [tail rattling]

like if you're sitting there staring

and there's one that's very upset,

they can keep this going for 20 or 30 minutes.

It's funny, there's other snakes that aren't rattlesnakes

and aren't dangerously venomous

that can blow air through their epiglottis

and make this sound through their mouth.

The theory is they're trying to mimic rattlesnakes.

It's actually kind of frightening when you step on those

and you hear that noise and you're like, oh,

no, it's not even a rattlesnake.

[tail rattling] [keyboard clacking]

Status-Cap-5979 says, How do snakes lay eggs?

Like, do they have a you know what?

All snakes have this structure here which is called a cloaca

and it's where all of their reproduction action happens.

It's where feces, urine and whatnot,

that all comes out in one single opening.

In this case, the eggs would be coming out of this species.

The cloaca is Latin for sewer, appropriately named.

And by the way, not all snakes lay eggs.

This snake does, this black Mexican king snake,

but boa constrictors, they have live babies.

North American water snakes have live babies

and it can be environmentally dependent as well.

If you live in very harsh environments, you're gonna tend

to have live babies so you can shuttle them around

and keep them in warm areas.

So to tell if your snake is a male or a female,

the one easy way is male snakes have hemipenes.

These are reproductive organs that are stored,

deflated inside the tail,

and they have two of them, a hemi-penis on each side.

So it's like a half a penis. Each side is a half a penis.

When the male snake wants to reproduce,

those hemipenes are inflated

and one side is inserted into the female snake.

And then sperm runs through these canals

or channels on the outside of the penis

into the ovidux of the female.

And the female can do one of two things.

It can be fertilized right then

and start producing babies, shell eggs,

or have the live birth eggs,

or they can store it in special tubules.

And so females can store sperm for many years.

Sometimes people will get snakes from the wild

and keep them in captivity for nature shows and stuff

and come in one day and all of a sudden find a whole bunch

of babies in the cage of which the animal was never paired

with another male,

likely because it's been storing sperm

for that period of time.

And females they just discovered have two clitoris,

so they have a hemiclitores.

What's up dude? Don't open that cloaca.

From the r/snakes subreddit, How accurate is the rhyme,

'red touches black, venom lack,

red touches yellow, bite a fellow'?

Well, my little friend here, Buddy the milksnake

is gonna help us answer that.

Red touches black, venom lack.

Yeah, sure that works in this milksnake.

So we know he is not the venomous coral snake

of which he's supposedly mimicking.

But if you get this poem mixed up

and like, you know, red touches yellow,

friend of a fellow, you're gonna die, right?

But they're also not that helpful in Central

and South America because sometimes you have venomous snakes

that are just bicolored that only have two colors.

So that poem could get you killed.

Best thing to do, folks.

If you don't know what it is, don't mess with it.

@ThirdEyeFlo asked, Apparently snakes have skeletons.

I though they were just strings of meat.

Well, let's look at our skeletonized gaboon viper.

I see lots of bones.

They have massive skeletons, definitely more vertebrae

with these ribs connected than human beings have.

These awesome, fairly kinetic skulls,

meaning some of the pieces of the skulls

can move independently.

This snake species from Africa has the largest fangs

of any venomous snake.

And what you can see is this snake has its backup fangs,

its replacement fangs coming here.

Snakes have a little ligament between the jawbones

and that ligament allows their jaws to separate

so when they're eating something like a big prey,

they can move it in and sort of walk over the prey.

And these little teeth allow the snake to hold onto prey

and they're re-curved

so they're curved inward towards the mouth

so that the prey can't go back out easily.

And then these guys, the vipurates,

have this modified maxilla,

a small little bone with a swiveling fang on the end of it.

And that fang is attached by a duct to the venom gland

and operates like a hypodermic needle

injecting venom into its prey.

This is the anaconda

and you can see these four rows

of teeth here on the maxilla, the palatine.

And these are fantastically large

and sharp for holding prey, bringing prey in.

So snakes have a lot of bones [keyboard clacking]

and they have very specialized bones.

@Heal_Hound asked,

If there are no dangerous snakes in New England,

what snake could they be referencing

with the 'Don't tread on me' refrain?

Ah, but there are venomous snakes in New England.

So we have copperheads and we have timber rattlesnakes.

And if you look at that animal on the Don't Tread Me flag,

you see a nice rattle

and you know that that has to be a timber rattlesnake.

Jurassic Patek asks, How many species

of snakes are there on the Earth

and how many are currently serving

in the United States Senate?

Well, I'm not gonna comment about the United States Senate,

but living species as of today,

there's 4,229 species found on every continent

except for Antarctica,

and they're also found in the Indian Ocean

and the Pacific Ocean.

And pretty much wherever you live,

you're gonna have a few species of snakes around you,

whether you know it or not.

Snakes are lizards.

They are part of a group of lizards that lost their limbs.

Lizards and snakes compose

around 11,000 species on the planet Earth.

There's many other kinds of limbless lizards.

They still have eyelids, but they're completely limbless.

Why would something lose its limbs?

How is that even an advantage?

Around, you know, 160 some million years ago,

snakes, which when you would have considered them lizards,

probably were either burrowing under the ground

and having limbs while you burrow makes it much more

difficult to burrow or in aquatic situations in the water.

But what's really cool is

not all snakes have lost their limbs.

So I have Precious Moments here, our lab ball python.

There's these little spurs right here

at the base of the tail,

and these spurs are the remnants of a femur.

A lot of the ancient fossil snakes have limbs,

Pachyrhachis, Najash,

all these ancient snakes back in the cretaceous,

but they're generally only the rear limbs.

@thekrispringle asked, Snake experts: which movie

actually got snakes right?

'Snakes on a Plane,' 'Anaconda'

or 'Indiana Jones'?

So first let's talk about Snakes on a Plane.

In the scene that we're watching here, there's a whole bunch

of different species of snakes.

What's very odd is they're attacking people en masse,

spitting venom and some spitting cobras can spit venom

and they're actually quite good at

spitting venom towards your eye.

But it's a mess. A lot of these do not look real.

They have color patterns I've never seen before.

There's some things that look like a gaboon viper,

but not quite.

They have the wrong teeth.

Snakes want to do three things.

They want to be left alone.

They want to breed and they want to eat.

The way to solve this problem would be just

to sit the F down and be really, really calm and still

and probably nothing would happen to you.

All right, next, let's talk about Anaconda.

And I've got a bit of experience catching some anacondas.

[snake hissing] [intense music]

This anaconda has so much strength,

it's using its tail to knock people in the water.

It's standing up, it's leaping at people.

It has an incredible awareness of its surrounding

and of each individual person on this cast.

Anacondas eat crocodilians and things like that.

They're not gonna eat people.

Reticulated pythons have been known

to eat people, small people.

This is ridiculous.

Okay, let's talk about this scene from Indiana Jones,

Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That tomb is filled with tons and tons of snakes.

Some of these are not snakes.

Some of them have ear holes

and eyelids, so they're leg-less lizards.

Maybe somebody on the set didn't really like snakes.

There are snakes that do not occur there.

I think there was just a boa,

which is only found in the new world.

There are areas of the world

where snakes hibernate together.

It's actually called Brumatian.

You can get copperheads or rattlesnakes

or rat snakes all denning in these areas over winter.

You're not gonna find cobras with

boas in the same region.

Yeah, it's pretty fabricated. Sorry.

@reziiel asked, Can snakes see farts?

Well, some snakes can see infrared, that is heat signatures.

So I would guess they could probably see farts.

I don't know what they would do with that,

but they probably can see them.

Most snakes do not see in infrared.

It's generally only pythonids and boads

and pit vipers that do that.

Some snakes like Precious Moments here.

If you look at her labial scales,

those are the scales on the lips,

there's these little pits in there.

There's a membrane inside there

and that membrane's suspended in air

and it detects slight changes in heat.

And that membrane then converts the heat signal

to a signal into the neuron

and then the brain converts that into an image.

In pit vipers like rattlesnakes and copperheads,

they develop a single pit,

hence the name Pit Viper, between their eye and nostril.

These snakes are probably seeing normal light images

filtered through how their eyes work,

and then they're also getting a map of

sort of the heat signatures around.

And the reason they want to know

what the world looks like in terms of infrared

is to detect prey, right?

So these guys are mostly gonna be eating warm-blooded prey,

so mammals or birds.

You know, a mammal or a bird is gonna light up

to this animal like massively. [keyboard clacking]

@JoeTse wants to know, Bruh, snakes are mad.

They can swim and walk, but don't have legs or fins?

WTF El Diablo.

The way most people see snakes when you see them moving

and slithering really fast,

that's called undulatory movement.

They kind of make a wave that goes down the body

and that wave feels different parts of the roughness

of the ground and pushes off on that.

And it happens so fast. It looks like an illusion.

They have a concertina way of moving,

which is it's kind of like an accordion

where they're all bunched up at one part,

stretch their head up

and then pull their back of their body.

They can sidewind on sand where they're mostly in the air,

limiting contact with the body in just little small parts.

They have a rectilinear motion,

which you see in big pythonids

and boas where they use their belly muscles

to pull themselves forward,

but they also swim with this undulatory movement.

They can glide.

They don't have powered flight,

but they can jump out of trees,

open up their ribs and kind of glide.

Chrysopelea in Southeast Asia can do this.

So they have many ways of moving without limbs.

Snakes can be pretty fast in short bursts of motion,

like, you know, moving at around 18 miles per hour,

but they're generally not sustained long runners

or anything like that.

And snakes like ball pythons or rattlesnakes,

which are sit and wait predators, they're extremely slow.

Slow moving, except they can do one thing really fast

and that is strike. [post button clicks]

Okay, u/drawingmentally wants to know,

What's the difference between poisonous and venomous?

If you bite it and you get sick, that's poisonous.

If it bites you and you get sick, that's venomous.

So basically poisonous are toxic chemicals

that are passively on the organism

such that if you bother them,

put them in your mouth, you'll get sick.

Venomous animals have a delivery system like fangs

and a gland that secretes venom onto those fangs.

All snakes are part of a group of snakes

and lizards called Toxicophera,

and that group has the ability to make venom.

Snakes that eat worms

or insects, they're not gonna develop any kind

of dangerous venoms,

but ones that eat mammals can develop these venoms.

That's gonna be rattlesnakes, cobras,

copperheads, coral snakes.

That's not the only strategy to subdue prey.

You can grab prey, constrict them.

But there's one snake

or one genus of snake called Rhabdophis

that you can find in Asia.

And that snake is very odd because it eats toads.

The toads have poisons, these toxins.

The snake sequesters them in an organ on their neck,

such that when you're to grab that snake,

it will push its neck on you to try

to get the toad toxins on you so you let it go,

which is kind of interesting because they are rear-fanged

and they do have venom, but they rarely ever bite.

@HellzWillRow82 asks,

Can a snake bite your butt when you're on the toilet?

It comes up via the U-bend. Hmm.

There have been reports of snakes coming up through toilets.

I've seen them.

I've had friends that have had snakes

coming up into the toilets.

Theoretically, they've moved

through openings in the pipe external

and then come up through that into the toilet.

And just last year, a friend of mine, a curator here,

had a racer in her toilet in Savannah, Georgia

and was asking what to do.

And I was like, Well, just leave the toilet lid open

and it'll eventually get out of there

'cause there's not gonna be any food

that it wants in the toilet.

And that would be an animal if you sat down on top of it,

you would get a butt bite from that thing.

I would feel like I won the lottery,

but I think most people would be pretty upset by that.

u/weirdlook has a question.

What is your craziest, scariest snake story?

I work on the genetics and genomics

and evolution of snakes in taxonomy,

how they're named, finding new species.

And to do this, I have to cover the world

and go into really remote places and forests

and live out there and work with my team members

and going out day and night and catching snakes

and drawing blood and DNA out of them

to understand their evolutionary history.

My team and the people that I work with,

we're some of the last of the explorers

of remote parts of the world to do this kind of research.

My main area is South America, occasionally Madagascar.

We just got back from a big collecting trip

to American Samoa, which was pretty remote.

Oddly enough, in South America,

some of the most common snakes we find

are these venomous snakes,

and they generally go by their genus name Bothrops.

And these venomous snakes are absolutely everywhere.

Their taxonomy's not well worked out,

but that's your guarantee when you're out in the field

in Brazil, which is pretty remarkable.

I've only had one time where I was bitten

through a cloth bag by a copperhead when I was young

on this finger, my ring finger,

but it didn't put any venom in the fang,

so I drew a lucky card on that one.

So I have never been envenomated.

I've been bitten by thousands of non-venomous snakes.

That's just part of doing the work.

Last year, I caught an anaconda.

That's fine, we do those sorts of things,

but it's usually the human interactions

that happen out in the field.

Being shot a couple of times,

that's a pretty crazy story when I was looking for snakes.

But as I'm pointing out,

the snakes themselves, I love them to death.

I'm excited to see them. I'm happy to see them.

So they don't seem like crazy stories.

They seem like my normal day.

@tntgal asked, Why do cobras have hoods?

Well, this strange curio from the old curio shop days,

not part of our collection, shows you this nice hood.

So why does this have this large hood?

It makes the animal look bigger,

makes it more intimidating to predators.

The other idea is that it could be honest signaling,

which is I'm venomous, F around and find out.

But also these patterns on the back of the neck present

as potentially like distracting or eye spots

or something that would ward off a predator from,

you know, coming from the back.

And since we're talking about cobras,

I think a lot of people's association with them

are watching videos of snake charmers,

and these are generally guys [flute whining]

that are playing some kind of flute

in front of the cobra and moving around.

The cobra's not hearing that noise.

They do have an ear,

but they generally hear through their jaws.

The flute is bothering the snake. It's moving around.

It feels threatened,

and so it's trying to negotiate what's happening.

It's not sitting there listening to a good tune

and, you know, rocking back and forth with that.

u/NatenNndos21 asks, Why do snakes shed their skin?

Well, as opposed to the way humans do

where we just have this turning over of skin,

snake's skin that's mainly keratinized like our fingernails

or hair, as the snake grows that outer layer,

that skin doesn't grow with them.

They have a hormonal response

that develops this new epithelial layer

and separates that from the old skin with this lymph fluid

between the old skin and the new skin beneath it.

That limp fluid makes them look cloudy

so when they're n shed their skin,

their eyes are all cloudy.

They have difficulty seeing.

They tend to retire and not be out as much.

And then eventually,

as those two layers have really separated from each other,

the snake will come out, rub its nose on a rock

or a rough surface

and crawl out of its own skin,

leaving it like a inside out sock.

u/Duck_Exe asks,

Mexican black kingsnake versus California kingsnake?

They're both gorgeous.

You know, the Mexican black kingsnakes,

all black, beautiful snake.

California kings come in a whole bunch of patterns of black

and white bands or stripes, also beautiful.

To pick between those two, it's like asking which

of my kids are my favorite.

I don't have a favorite. I love them all.

Kingsnakes as a group have the ability

to eat venomous snakes.

So they can eat rattlesnakes, they can eat copperheads.

And when they're bitten by those venomous snakes,

they don't really suffer from that.

They have an ability to neutralize those venoms.

And this is a project

that I'm actually working on right now.

What are all the proteins that allow them

to survive these rattlesnake bites?

In the old days, farmers used to like these guys

because they would, you know,

keep the venomous snakes under control.

And there's a lot of snakes on the planet

that eat venomous snakes.

And generally, people working in agriculture in those areas

like in South America will know which ones

are eating the venomous snakes and generally not harm them.

From u/NoodlesBlep, What's your dream snake?

Well, my dream snake can be represented

right here in this cast,

and this is a Spilotes pullatus, which is a Central

and South American Tiger Snake.

These get very, very big, incredibly fast on the ground.

You often find them high up in trees.

A lot of people, I think, believe snakes hang out

on the ground or in water and stuff.

These guys are super arborial,

but they can come to the ground.

They inflate their necks when they're scared,

and they also will not hesitate

to bite you if you grab them.

Beautiful animal. You're very lucky if you see this animal.

u/SalmonSammySamSam asks, Snakes are deaf, right?

So how does this work?

Well, that is true.

Snakes don't have external ears,

but they do have internal ears.

And so while they generally can't hear vibrations

or noises through the air,

they can feel them through their jawbones.

There is some evidence that they might be able

to detect some heavy vibrations in the air

or even along their body,

but mainly it would be through their jawbones

directly to the internal ears. [keyboard clacking]

u/Medbourne50 asks, What happens to the bones

of animals that snakes eat?

If you're gonna eat a deer or you're gonna eat a mouse

or a bird or another snake, snakes don't have limbs.

They can't disassemble these animals,

so they have to eat the whole animal.

This requires some serious, strong digestive juices

and acids that can pretty much break most things down,

the bone, skin, muscle, et cetera, from animals.

Things like hair and feathers can sometimes make it through

that don't get digested.

So a really large snake,

it could take an incredibly long amount of time to digest,

weeks to potentially a month.

When they're not eating, when they're, you know, fasting,

they haven't eaten a meal,

most of their digestive system gets down regulated, right?

It's not being used. It gets really, really small.

They don't have to consistently eat,

which is a major adaptation. [keyboard clacking]

@reese_clutter asked, How does antivenom even work?

Venom in many species of snakes

can shut down the nervous system

by blocking signals between nerves and muscle.

They can destroy cells, cytotoxins.

They can destroy blood vessels.

And one of the coolest parts is

they can have anticoagulant properties,

and these anticoagulant properties stop animals

from clotting and causing them to bleed out

and allow the venom to move through the body.

So how does antivenom work?

The way it's produced is you take the venom,

you grab the snake's head, you'll have a little container

with a rubber covering.

The snake will bite that rubber covering

and you can push the head down

and squeeze the venom from the venom glands,

the duvenois glands, into the container.

And you pump that through in low amounts

through farm animals like sheep.

They've been doing this for more than a hundred years.

Those animals produce antibodies to the venom.

You separate those antibodies

and then put it into somebody who's been bitten by a snake,

a venomous snake, and those antibodies stop

the action of those venoms.

But you can't take it as a prophylactic.

You can only have it after

you're bitten by a venomous snake.

Throughout the United States,

there's serpentariums that make them.

They're made globally.

Some make monovalents,

which are targeted towards one species.

Some makes polyvalents, where the venoms are targeted

to multiple species.

It's fairly costly to make.

You have to house venomous snakes.

You have to have staff to actually milk them,

which is quite a dangerous job.

It's quite an expensive process.

u/slow jahovitz asked,

Pythons are eating the Florida Everglades.

Should we eat them instead?

The Everglades have an invasive species

called the Burmese Python.

This Burmese python numbers probably into the hundreds

of thousands of individuals,

and they're having a major impact on mammal fauna there.

Burmese pythons can get around 15, 16 feet in the max.

I think there is one in Florida that was captured

that was 19 feet long and a couple of hundred pounds.

The Florida Everglades, which are a gigantic protected park,

it's an extremely unique biome.

It's part of our American heritage.

You cannot legally grab anything

in that park without permits,

but they do have these roundups where they're trying

to eliminate these animals.

Some of these roundups are pretty wild.

Some of the people that get the most number

of snakes in a day win a pickup truck

and all this kind of stuff.

Southern Florida is subtropical

and the subtropical habitats are good for lots

of species around the world.

And that's probably the main reason why Florida has more

than 60 introduced reptiles.

And these introduced animals may have been

let out by pet people.

There's been some evidence in the past

that hurricanes have knocked over some of these areas

that people were keeping these pets and they got out.

But it's definitely a recipe for disaster

if you were going to have lots of introduced exotic species

that come from tropical areas of the world.

So it's kind of like, you know, the cat's out of the bag.

There's pretty much nothing we can do about it.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching Snake Support.

[upbeat music]

[Assistant] You opened the bottle of water?

No, I only got alcohol here.

During prohibition,

the janitors would drink the alcohol out of the jars.

When you couldn't get alcohol, man,

people get pretty desperate.