Botanical field work and snakes

Mostly TPP has a laissez-faire relationship with snakes: if they don't bother me, TPP won't bother them.  For about a decade, a great deal of TPP's field work was done in Queensland, the wet tropics in the vicinity of Cairns (one of my study sites can be seen from the city's harbor, in the distance).  If there's anything you need to learn quickly in Queensland before venturing into its rainforests, it's that virtually every snake that isn't a python is poisonous and certain bushes and trees have vicious stinging hairs.  So when an Aussie field hockey player tries to remove a snake from the field and gets bitten in the process, and dies because it's one of the truly dangerously toxic venomous snakes, you have to sort of wonder about where he was brought up.  Dang, TPP had just one encounter with a taipan, and an image of this sleek snake was burned into his skull after shooing one out of the parking area behind his QLD apartment.  His study site was alive with the common brown snake, another top 10 venomous snake (see linked article for a top 10 rundown), but a rather shy and rather easily intimidated snake.  Good thing!  This makes TPP's current study site in Costa Rica relatively safe what with only fer-de-lances lurking everywhere in the leaves.  There are lots of other little vipers around: eye-lash viper, hog-nosed viper, and the not so little bushmaster, and in spite of nearly stepping on a hog-nosed viper on his first day at this field station, TPP still feels safer than when in Australia. So what was the field hockey player's big, and fatal, mistake?  Not wearing Wellington boots!  Hey, got any field work volunteers out there? 

Primate Brain and Snakes

Deep down in the ancestral primate brain lurks an innate fear of snakes. Something rustles in the dry grass next to where you are standing; you startle and jump away ready to flee. The reason is fairly simple the instinctively jumpy primate lives to have more offspring than the curious one who looks to see what made the rustling noise, and then the curious ones become biologists. So it comes as no surprise that even at a very young age, 3 years old, humans readily notice snakes. This is great to know, but unfortunately my students are 20-something years old (they only act like 3 yr olds) and not only have they not learned all that much, but their basic instincts seem to have been blunted as well, so my worry continues. The illustration at the link shows a nicely coiled, hood-flaired cobra against a white back ground, and who would wonder about the human ability to notice that. The real world isn't so nice, and where my research is done the snakes are really, really a lot harder to spot. Here's a nice fer-de-lance in its typical understory habitat, right under one of my study trees, and it's one heck of a lot harder to see, even for a 3-year old. Hint: the head is almost dead center at the bottom of the picture looking to your left. Can you say camouflaged?

Rainforest Field Trip - BE CAREFUL OUT THERE PEOPLE!

In the opinion of virtually all field workers, the dangers of working in a rain forest are far less than the dangers of visiting a big city. Mostly you learn what to look out for and you behave very very carefully. But when you have so many rookies you do worry that one of them will make a mistake, and the university frowns upon coming home with fewer students than you took. Actually once we came home with one additional one, but that's another story. The big problem is that some things are just plain hard to see, but every now and then, for reasons that are not at all well understood, some organisms stand out a bit more than others. Of the about 50 species of snakes at this field station, only 7 are poisonous, 5 pit vipers and 2 coral snakes. For the most part the pit vipers are quite well camouflaged and at times nigh on invisible. It makes you nervous to know a snake is there (marked with flagging) and still be unable to see the critter against its background. The eye lash viper is an exception. It comes in two natural color patterns, a green & brown pattern that is quite invisible against it barky background, this being a somewhat arboreal snake. How nice, right there at eye level. But it also comes in a very bright yellow or gold form that seems quite conspicuous in comparison, so it doesn't quite make biological sense. The trouble is that the number of yellow vipers you see tells you how many of the camouflaged ones you don't see. This handsome fellow was pretty small, maybe 25-30 cm long. A couple of scales over each eye make the lashes. Rule 7: no messing with poisonous snakes. Students who ignore this rule are on their last field trip, if you know what I mean.