snake venom?
- Thread starter foofoo
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foofoo said:
It's not for the faint of heart and it's also not for the average person who doesn't own an ultracentrifuge, lyophilization system, and lots of expertise in biochemistry. Antivenin (=antivenom) producers purchase their venoms exclusively from established suppliers--in the US, most established suppliers are in Florida and Texas and most of the supply comes from the two diamondback rattlesnake species, which yield lots of potent venom in a single "milking." The hazard is obvious and lots of milkers have done lots of hospital time (keeping ten fingers and an intact liver are challenges for longtime snake milkers). The suppliers have very elaborate setups for maintaining the snakes, milking them periodically, purifying and freeze-drying the venom, and packaging it for shipment to antivenin producers. There are safer ways to make a living.
the guy i ran into said he was retired and did it for something to do. i asked if he has ever been bitten and he said twice. he told me that there were 3 types of poisonous snakes in the pines. cant remember but i think he said diamond back was one and some kind of a rounded pattern diamond variation? he also said something about copper heads in the 80-s and maybe a water moccasin? in all my years in the pines i have seen what i thought was a poisonous snake. it was small and had red colors in it.
They're is one poisionous snake in the pines and that is the timber rattlesnake, and they are extremely rare at that. The guy sounds like maybe 10% of the things that came out of his mouth are true....maybe. Many people have sworn to me they saw water moccasin in new jersey. I would say on average they have 10-12 teeth, a 10th grade education at most, and have a least one to two cars up on cinder blocks in there backyard. However the snake you saw sounds interesting I wonder if it was a scarlet snake.http://www.snakesandfrogs.com/scra/snakes/images/scarlet10.jpg
The snake with the red being described can be a milk snake or a corn snake also. As far as moccasin's are concerned they are not found north of the Dismal Swamp in Virginia.
and we have no copperheads in the pines either..... which i find strange- because it seems like they are everywhere around us. north jersey, pa, maryland, deleware.
ive heard stories from someone in millville that said they caught a baby copperhead in there back yard(the house is near menantico) and it bit him in the pinky, after that he decided to let it loose, he deserved it for keeping the snake, but he had markings on his pinky, snake bite? who knows, there are alot of woods out there, and if there are copperheads around us, who knows maybe somewhere, there are some, i wouldnt rule them out just yet.
you could be right- i suppose... but i think if there are (or were) copperheads in the pines, somebody would of found one by now.
The guy who caught the baby copperhead was probably the same guy that said there are diamondbacks and three posionous snakes in the pines. I don't think the habitat is here for copperheads, no rocky outcroppings or any rocks for the matter..... except the ones in the pines that bigfoot threw at that guy in the bsss river bigfoot post.
yeah your probably right, im gonna make it a goal to find a copperhead in the pines, or at least try, im gonna ask this guy if he has a pic, and if he does than ill start to consider what he said, i guess i should look near rivers and creek because copperheads like to live near water right?
I've seen a few in pa in rocky outcroppings about 200 yards away from a stream, same spots as I've seen timber rats. I'm just trying to find a hognose or another pine snake in cumberland county, but my window is closing fast.
The Barrens have been collected by professional herpetologists very thoroughly, and pretty early they turned up rarities (for those days) such as scarlet snakes, worm snakes, and ground skinks. Well-known early herpetologists such as Karl Kauffeld, Roger Conant, G.K. Noble, and R. L. Ditmars all collected throughout the Barrens and deposited hundreds of voucher specimens in the museums of the US. Not one of them or the hundreds of other early but highly experienced collectors and the thousands of more recent ones ever found a copperhead in the Barrens (or a cottonmouth either).
I will point out that the preference the northern copperhead exhibits for rocky places is at huge variance to the preferred swampy, lowland habitat preferred by the southern copperhead, and in fact if copperheads did occur in the Barrens I wouldn't be shocked if they had greater ecological and morphological affinities to the southern form, just as the Pine Barrens timber rattler more closely resembles ecologically and morphologically the "canebrake" (southern swamp) version of the timber rattler than it does the upland rock dwelling version from northern NJ, Pennsylvania, New York, etc. Pine Barrens reptiles for the most part have more southern affinities--several forms reach their northern limit in the Barrens, and none except the common garter snake and perhaps the northern water snake could definitely be attributed to a northern origin. That's as opposed to the pine, king, corn, ringneck, and scarlet snakes, and the ground skink and eastern fence lizards. It's possible that the Barrens timber rattler actually colonized from the montane populations and its ecological and morphological resemblance to the southern form is evolutionary convergence rather than common ancestry--molecular phylogeographic studies would probably be required to clear that up.
Again, though, even a very rare copperhead would be tough to miss, and the pairs of eyes looking for it have come in legions over the past 100 years.
Sean Barry
Several months (or a year-or-more ?)ago when I brought up this topic of "why no copperheads in the NJPBs?" there seemed to be no satisfactory answer. I mentioned that I'd never seen one when I was herping actively in the PBs in the 50s and 60s and just assumed they weren't s'posed t'be there. Later, when I spent time in the south east and living in east Texas, I marveled at the copperheads that were plentiful in the sandy oak-pine-palmetto (very NJPB-like) from southern VA, thru the Carolinas and GA, northern FL, and across the Gulf states to Texas. But then, of course , I failed (being the lumper that I am) to recognize that it is the SOUTHERN copperhead that abounds down in Dixie - NOT the northern copperhead!
Let's remember, the NORTHER copperhead has a wide range in the north-east, and none of that range includes any biomes even remotely similar to the NJPBs. "O.K.!" I hear you cry; "...so since we have pine snakes, king snakes, corn snakes, scarlet snakes, canebrake-oid rattlers, and a plethora of other plant and animal species typical of the southeast coastal plain, then WHY NO SOUTHERN COPPERHEADS?" Well... I don't know, but I'd have to ask, in the same vein, why no Eastern diamondbacks, water mocassins, 4-lined rat snakes, yellow-bellied watersnakes, pigmy rattlers, and many other south-eastern coastal plain herps that are found in supposedly PB-like environs further south?
Probably because 'tho we see the SE coastal plain sandy pine/oak forests as essentially identical to the PBs we know and love in NJ, those "absent-but-oughtta-be-there" species just see it differently... and remember; it's their biological needs/attitudes that counts, not ours!
Is it just the winter temperatures? Mocassins live (or lived) as far north as southern Illinois where winters can be at least as severe as those in the maritime climate of southern NJ; a couple of spp. of Tantilla occur as far north as southern IN and north central MO - again with winters often more testing of hardiness than those of the NJPBs.
I'm offering no specific answers here, just some food-for-thought to mull over when we think we are asking an obviously simple question.
And ( as I step up on the soap box...) the longer we ignore the clear and present evidence of progressive climatic change associated with global warming, and fail to address (and re-dress) the manners in which our specie's activities are contributing to effecting that change, the question "why are there no copperheads in the pine barrens of New Jersey" will pale in significance in comparison with the results of ignoring even more obvious questions about what we have done and are doing to our home planet.
Have a nice week.
Best'y'all,
Dave
very nicely put, would the terrain further south and further north of us have gaps with terrain they dont like, for instance, this is all hypethetical, lets say that florida has a really rocky terrain, for lets say rattlers, but states in between florida and here were all grassland, they wouldnt have that rocky terrain to live in to work there way up here, does any of that make sense or am i thinking too hard, in any case the chances of ever finding a copperhead seem near impossible but i got one last argument if i may, what about the coelacanth being caught in Indonesian water, you could say the same this, if humans have fished there for food so long, why just a few years back did they find this prehistoric fish, just like why havent we found any copperheads, maybe we just need to dive the metaphoric submarine down further, or maybe im just a crazy optimistic 17 year old kid, i have no clue, and might never have a clue, and i talk too much,
adios
adios
Jes' f'r the record, that coelocanth was caught AND IDENTIFIED in '38; even I think that's a bit more than "...just a few years back..." My point is that the creature had probably come up in nets before that instance, but had just been considered some sort of trash fish. It wasn't until someone with a bit ichthyological systematics in his make-up was there to say "Hey! That oughtn't to be here!" that that paleological residuum was recognized for what it was.
As for the copperhead in the PBs? - the PBs have been herped over more assiduously than almost any other ophidian habitat in the northern hemisphere. That is to say that close to every square meter of the pines has been trod by more knowledgable herpetologists - professional and amateur - than any other bit of real estate you can imagine simply due to their proximity to our northeast population centers. I had the good fortune to have encountered Kauffeld, Summerfield, and Conant in the pines (at Asa Pitman's place and, by chance, elsewhere) and to have chatted with them on their home turfs (Staten Island and Philly) and was well impressed with their extensive knowledge of the PBs. For field naturalists of their calibre to have spent the time in the pines that they did and be convinced that copperheads were not to be found there struck me, at first, as likely merely evidence of gaps in their experience. Alas; such is the overweening self-confidence of youth. But after close to 20 years of my own herping in the pines, I finally had to agree with them.
And so, should the day dawn that someone does report a confirmed sighting/capture/photograph of a copperhead in the NJPBs, it'll take some serious, world-class convincing before I'll accept that it wasn't planted there by some pseudonaturalist trying to make a name for himself.
Yeah, yeah; I know... I shouldn't hold it all inside... should just say what I think... Well, I'm tryin' mightily to improve in that regard !
Best t'y'all,
Dave
I have a question can someone explain to me why the scarlet snake is not endangered or threatened in south jersey. Are they "uncommon" but just very secretive spending most time under ground, or out at night. It seems like people find all the other snakes in south jersey from time to time, whether on this site or other reptile forums, but the scarlet is always absent. Also here is an unreal trip someone had to the pines, I'm very jealous, http://www.fieldherpforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6350.
well the pic of the scarlet snake that was put up recently on this site, looked like the scarlet snake had a "shovel" type nose, i guess for digging, maybe they are just underground as you said, and WOW that is THE BEST herping trip ive ever seen, very impressive, i wish i could get a day with 1/5 those finds
The original two Pine Barrens specimens of the scarlet snake were found under a railroad station house (I've forgotten which) in the late 1930's, and a couple of decades went by before any more were found. They are indeed burrowers, and like most burrowing snakes they are also "active" (i.e., found) on the surface (under surface litter) only for a very limited time during the year. For other such fossorial (burrowing) snake species, it's not unusual to find that "cracking the code" on how to find them is the key--once the code is cracked they're easy, just only for a short seasonal time span and all the rest of the year they're almost impossible. In California it's the last week of April and the first week of May and in the Arizona desert it's May and September, and I suspect that in New Jersey it's late spring. When I was 10 at Camp Columbus I found a scarlet snake under a board alongside the road to Bamber and the camp naturalist was delighted to say the least (this was 1961). Up to then perhaps 10 others besides the original two railroad snakes had been recorded from the Barrens. Nowadays it seems that scarlet snakes have turned up all over the Barrens and elsewhere in southern New Jersey (even the Delaware Valley). Rare? Definitely not. Secretive and tricky to find? Definitely so. It's clearly not rare or endangered in a legal sense, but the only problem with it's secretiveness is that determined collectors have been known to tear up surface refuge habitat pretty thoroughly to find pretty, secretive snakes. It's hard to know if tearing up surface litter actually affects fossorial species population size, but it seems prudent to limit that type of activity.
Also, for the collectors (herpetoculturists), the scarlet snake has a reputation as one of the worst captive snakes, unless you happen to have a steady supply of lizard eggs to feed it.
Sean Barry