The jararaca is one of South America’s most venomous snakes, so you probably want to avoid stepping on one at all costs. Unless you’re Joao Miguel Alves-Nunes, a biologist at Brazil’s Butantan Institute. In that case, your approach to studying jararacas’ biting behavior is to enter it (gently) 40,000 times.
“The best way to do this research is to bring snakes and a human together. In this case, I was the human,” the bold researcher told Science. “We put the snakes in a ring on the floor of our laboratory until they got used to it, then I stepped in with special protective boots.
“I stepped close to the snake and also went lightly on top of it. But I didn’t put all my weight on my foot so I didn’t hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped on each animal 30 times, a total of 40,480 steps.”
Only bite if you step on it?
Alves-Nunes wanted to test the common assumption that jararacas only bite if stepped on, a piece of local wisdom that ultimately turned out to be false. The scientist eventually discovered that many of the animals bit when he got close to them and that the snakes became more aggressive in warmer temperatures.
He also found that smaller specimens, especially younger females, were more likely to bite. Finally, snakes were also more likely to be aggressive during the day. Alves-Nunes published his research in the journal Scientific reports.
The scientist’s protective equipment consisted of sturdy, knee-high leather boots reinforced with protective foam. During the 40,000 tests, not a single jararaca bite penetrated. Unfortunately, a side test involving a rattlesnake bite yielded different results: the snake’s powerful bite came through the boot.
He is allergic to both poison and antidote
As Alves-Nunes explains, the Butantan Institute is a leader in snakebite treatments, and he was immediately well cared for. But in a case of cosmic misfortune for a scientist who works with deadly snakes, Alves-Nunes discovered that he was allergic to both rattlesnake venom and And the antidote used to treat his wound. He had to take fifteen days of medical leave.
Yet the researcher was not deterred. After strengthening his boots, he was back in the ring with jararacas.
“The difficult thing is that after my accident, some people started to see me as reckless. And that is not true,” Alves-Nunes emphasized.
“I performed these experiments with a solid scientific basis, followed the same protocol thousands of times and had only one accident. And from that accident a research question arose: I now compare the bite force of rattlesnakes and jararacas and how resistant different materials and shoes are to that.”
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