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Is that a Texas thing?

he said it was far worse than when he got rear ended by a 18 wheeler and had his neck broke

Rattler, no comments on the neo tropicals?
I'm going on memory and it's been years.

neotropical rattlers? blindness is a common side effect in bites.....one species, the Cascavel Crotalus durissus terrificus, it happens in roughly 60% of bites if i remember right.....neurotoxins rule with theses species but enough other toxins are present to destroy muscle tissue.....

Snakes are the most fascinating of God's zoo creation. I respect and admire them.

Rattler on page 3 I posted a youtube... What kind of snake is that thing??

python.....said somewhere else in here that i thought it was a scrub python cause of the lack of much of a pattern......watching it again im not so sure thats what it is.....looks to stocky to be a scrub.....would help if i knew exactly where the video was taken......looks to heavy to be a retic for the length but an over fed retic would get chunky but its hard to over feed a retic that size cause they have a faster metabolism than most other large pythons until they get much longer....

im half pulling this guess out of my arse but im thinking it was a video was taken in the US and its a paternless burmese python.....basically a burmese python that was selectively bred to have nearly no pattern, its not an albino, it just has the background coloring and none of the foreground blotches.....

Thanks, all I know is I got up and ran around the room like a 7 year old...

deal with pythons much and yah learn not to jerk away

pythons, like most snakes have recurved teeth, when they bite and hold on if you jerk one of two things is gonna happen.....if the snake doesnt have a hold of anything with the rest of its body or its a small snake your just gonna fling the snake around and your not gonna accomplish a dang thing other than making the upcoming bruise worse......

if its a big snake or has a grip of something with its tail end a good chunk of whatever it has a hold of is gonna stay in its mouth while your rip the rest away and your really gonna bleed....

weirdest bite ive ever had was from a hatchling spotted python, one of the smallest python species that happens to come from Australia......my mom referred to them as pencils with teeth cause thats about how big they were when i got them.....i used to get all my snakes used to being handled cause its a small town, word gets out and lil kids want to see them, prolly spent more time showing them to my siblings friends than anything....

well i had just gotten these 3 spotted pythons and they were all wrapped around the fingers of my left hand, had my arm propped on the chair arm in the livingroom watching TV, just letting the snakes get used to being held but not paying much attention to them cause they seemed content sitting with my hand as their perch.....

what happened next took me about 5 full seconds to register.....guess i had my hand full of baby snakes a lil to close to my face and i was a lil to engrossed in whatever was on TV.....apparently the human eyelid blinking looks alot like a squirming newborn baby mouse to a spotted python hatchling cause next thing i know, i had a 10 inch long, skinny snake attached to my eyelid....as i said took me a bit to figure out just why i could no longer open my eye as the weight of the snake dangling from it was just enough to keep it shut....

a snake that small doesnt have much for teeth and spotted pythons dont have terribly long teeth as adults anyway.....got up, got a glass of cold water and poured it over the snake and it let go.....teeth didnt even go deep enough to bleed...

123456,

Not sure if the Tiger is that toxic, but they have a very small head compared to their body (and probably small venom glands), actually somewhat common in the hills around Tucson and Phoenix.

Pretty sure the Mohave is the most toxic in the US, but there are possibly two populations, Mohave A and Mohave B, and one has the neurotoxic components in the venom, the other is much more of a tissue destroying toxin.

Rattlesnake venom is a complex mix of proteins, and a lot more rattlers are being discovered to have neuro toxic components in the mix. The midget faded rattler, and the pacific rattler I believe have both had neurotoxins discovered in the venom of some individuals.

Danger to a human from a rattlesnake bite is a combination of venom toxicity, how much the snake has to give, how much of the venom it delivers, where it hits you, how you react, and how far (time-wise) you are from competent medical help.

There is a paper in the literature about doing DNA sequencing on different rattlesnake venoms (of the old Western Rattlesnake clade) and they discovered that a group that was thought to be related was really two groups, only distantly related, and that neurotoxic venom developed independently in two sub-species.

Sycamore

your pretty well right other than the tiger rattler does fall on the more toxic end but as you noted the smaller size factors in.....do know in the footnotes ive read about the midget faded that like the mohave's different areas have snakes with different toxicity but not as much work has been done with them cause they are alot rarer than mohaves and their smaller size makes them less of an overall potential threat to humans....

if yah happen to know where i can find the dna study you speak of i would be interested.....think ive missed that one somehow and would like to read it....

Big, Medium, Small,....all the same when they show up near the house for breakfast.

Saute' over a very low heat, Garlic, and a dash of Taragon,.....go VERY easy on the salt.

serve with Eggs, and fresh Corn Tortillas.

GTC

You certainly do not want to take a hit from any rattlesnake species, but my understanding is that the Tiger, Mojave, and Midget-faded have the most potent venoms of the NA species. The Southern Pacific and Mexican West Coast species are also quite toxic.

The Central and South American species of rattlers are extremely dangerous but I believe the lance-heads (Bothrops) account for more bites in that part of the world than Crotalus does. Some of these pit-vipers are incredibly toxic and their bites can be highly destructive.

Douglas, Douglas, Schuett, Porras, & Holycross [2002. Phylogeography of the Western Rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis) complex, with emphasis on the Colorado Plateau]. Pp. 11-50. In Biology of the Vipers [Schuett, H�ggren, Douglas, and Greene (editors). Eagle Mountain Publishing, Eagle Mountain, Utah. xii + 580 pp. + 16 color plates]

Shoot me a pm with email addy, I'm pretty sure I have the .pdf on a hard drive somewhere around here. Might have the paper by Pook as well.

Sycamore

actually the lance heads tend to have more of the tissue destroying componants than the tropical rattlers.....infection is a beotch in a third world country, the venom isnt what kills yah, the tissue rot does....

interesting offshoot of this venom talks, if your near medical attention the best venomous snake to take a bite from is one of the southeast Asian krait species, i forget which.....the venom is a pure neurotoxin that paralyzes the skeletal muscles and diaphragm but not the cardiac muscle.....hook you up to a ventilator and wait it out, once the venom deteriorates you can breath again and there is no other side effects unlike most other snake species that have either more destructive neurotoxins or have the tissue destroying toxins.....

So do the lance-heads have cytotoxic properties? I'd always been under the impression that they had a more potent hematoxin than their rattler cousins.

The other issue with the concolor, is where they live, very few people. The Mojaves have Phoenix and Tucson in their range, and all the southern California recreators tromping on them on weekends.

Take a triangle from Page Arizona to 4 Corners, to Grand Junction, that's about the range of the concolor, and I doubt if 10,000 people live within that space of what, 10,000 sq mi.?

That makes MT look crowded!

Sycamore

you do realize your asking me this at the end of a long day with pain meds in my system

quick look through the two books i have handy by the bed just say "tissue destroying" for the couple main species and specific note that fer-de-lance venom also destroys red blood cells and mucus membranes.....

very true....