Swaziland resident Clifton Koen doesn’t really care for snakes, but his wife, Thea Litschka-Koen, is crazy about them. With her husband’s sometimes reluctant help, she has endeavored to change attitudes about black mambas and other snakes found in the area. In addition to starting the nation’s only reptile park, devoted to educating the public and providing a refuge for the animals, the two have become the region’s go-to experts for safe, humane snake removal from homes, schools, resorts and workplaces. In the course of catching and relocating any number of snakes per day, Thea and Clifton give impromptu lessons about the snakes, covering fact and fiction, and do their best to prevent any unnecessary casualties – human or reptile.

In addition to their other efforts, Thea and Clifton developed a program designed to track black mambas in the wild for the first time and to gain new insights into their behavior. With the help of a snake expert from Johannesburg, they were able to surgically insert radio transmitters in a number of captured black mambas, allowing them to follow the snakes after their release. If their research pays off, they may be able to show that their relocations are working, successfully removing snakes from residential areas for the long term, and thereby bringing some relief to the locals and some respite for the snakes.

NATURE’s Black Mamba premieres Sunday, November 8 at 8pm (check local listings).

Photo by Andrew Yarme © Tigress Productions

You know those beautiful little tropical frogs with electric blue or orange markings? A single touch of their skin could kill you.

Have you ever seen an elegant cone snail shell lying on the beach? Well, beware! It hides a poison harpoon that is deadly.

And watch out! Those snakes and lizards could be armed with venom and toxic saliva.

Amazingly, they may also hold cures to many human diseases. Scientists have discovered that natural poisons, toxins, and venoms contain chemicals that can be used to create an array of drugs for treating everything from chronic pain to cancer. For instance, the cone shell’s venom, packed with nerve-debilitating conotoxins, provides the basis for a new painkiller. Contortrostatin, a component found in copperhead venom, is being used to attack breast cancer cells and to prevent cancer from spreading.

Call it the poison paradox — or The Venom Cure.

To order a copy of The Venom Cure, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for The Venom Cure was originally posted April 2005.

NATURE’s The Reptiles: Snakes reveals the secrets, surprises, and strangeness of two-headed snakes and other amazing reptiles.

The Reptiles continues with a look at the reptiles that humans may fear most: Snakes. But the film does not portray snakes as evil creatures. Rather, it takes us into their secret and very strange world to try to understand them better.

Even though most snakes are not lethal to humans, many people are still terrified of these slithering reptiles. The program illustrates how venomous snakes bite humans only in self-defense and would much rather not confront us. Snakes also provide a valuable service by controlling the rodent population.

To order a copy of The Reptiles: Snakes, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for The Reptiles: Snakes was originally posted February 2003.

Haast, featured in the NATURE program Victims of Venom, has spent more than 50 years working with venomous snakes. Like many people, he became fascinated with snakes as a child. Unlike most, however, his fascination continued into adulthood, and, in his travels around the world as an airline flight engineer, he was able to pick up and bring home many snakes.

At the Serpentarium, Haast “milks” his snakes by forcing the reptiles to release their venom into a beaker. Then he sells the poisonous liquid both to medical researchers and to the pharmaceutical companies that make antivenin, the antidote for snake bites. To produce antivenin, scientists inject horses with small, non-lethal doses of venom. Over time, the horses naturally build up antibodies specifically designed to neutralize the injected venom. Eventually, samples of the horse’s blood are collected, and the antibodies within are extracted and processed into commercial formulations of antivenin. Some antivenins will work against venom from several species of snake; others are specific to a single type.

Haast might consider his snakebites to be all in a day’s work, but most people are a bit more traumatized by such an event. Venomous snakes can be found in nearly every state in the nation, and about 8,000 people suffer bites every year. While a snakebite can certainly be a scary event, not all are life-threatening. Different species of snakes carry different types of venom, with varying degrees of toxicity, and larger, older snakes typically pack more wallop into a bite than their smaller brethren.

However, young snakes, born primed with venom, tend to be less discriminating and more aggressive than adults. Nine to 15 people do die of snake bites every year, so experts at the American Red Cross advise treating every snake bite as a medical emergency: bite victims should wash the bite with soap and water, immobilize the bitten area and keep it lower than the heart, and get medical help.

One of Haast’s scariest bites occurred in 1990, when he was bitten by a very dangerous species, the soft-scaled viper, while harvesting its venom. “Their venom completely prevents the clotting of blood,” says Haast. “It’s even worse than the disease hemophilia. But there is very little pain to make you think anything’s wrong. Some people who have been bitten by this species are released from the hospital, thinking they are fine, then they go home and die of internal bleeding a week later.”

When, the next day, Haast noticed his own bite was still bleeding, he began seeking the best possible treatment. A fellow snake expert, Dr. Sherman Minton, told him he needed a rare type of antivenin that was available only in Iran. “As you can imagine, that wasn’t easy to do,” says Haast. He spent nine days in a hospital, being very careful not to bump against anything lest he start bleeding, waiting for the crucial antivenin to arrive. A courier finally managed to smuggle it out of Iran and deliver it to Florida just in time.

The soft-scaled viper carries a type of venom known as hemotoxin, a venom that attacks the circulatory system and causes blood to clot severely or else to stop clotting entirely, either of which can be fatal. Other venoms, such as those of the deadly Asian cobras and kraits, are neurotoxins, which affect the nervous system, causing paralysis and sometimes respiratory arrest. Myotoxins, found mostly in Australian sea snakes, affect the muscles.

Whatever the mechanism, the purpose of the venom is usually to immobilize the victim and start the process of digestion, much as human saliva does. In general, neurotoxins act more rapidly than hemotoxins and may be more serious.