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SPEAKER_07: He's stopped whalers out in the Pacific Ocean. He rescued a dolphin held captive in an Indonesian resort. Oh yeah. And he's been stabbed twice.
SPEAKER_03: That's the host of Science Versus, Wendy Zuckerman, who I'm pretty sure has only been stabbed once.
SPEAKER_07: And recently Pete's work brought him to Costa Rica and that's where his luck almost ran out. This was just before Christmas. Pete was deep in the rainforest with his team and they were looking for evidence of illegal logging and hunting. Picture it. It's a lush forest, thick canopy, very hilly.
SPEAKER_04: But it's up and down, up and down, up and down, really steep. It's got the most ferocious ants on earth. It's got poisonous spiders. And they are all over the place. A lot of the trees have very spiky trunks on them. So you need to be really careful walking.
SPEAKER_07: That's Pete. And while he was walking very carefully through the rainforest, something got him.
SPEAKER_04: I just felt this bang in the back of my leg. And my first thought was someone had hit me. Like it felt like someone had a big stick or a piece of wood and whacked the back of my calf. And then I looked down and then higher I see the snake sort of recoiling away from me with its head. And it was sticking about two feet off the ground. And as soon as I saw it, like I knew it was a fur lance.
SPEAKER_03: The fur-de-lance or spearhead is the most deadly snake in Central America. Right away, Pete's colleague grabbed his cell phone.
SPEAKER_07: He had one bar of reception and called up emergency services.
SPEAKER_04: They did make it clear, you need to get their guy to hospital as quickly as possible or he is going to die.
SPEAKER_07: Pete had maybe six hours to get to a hospital. And to get there, he had to dodge all the spikes and spiders and other snakes in the rainforest. Pete had two options. He could go up on the ridge of the mountain, which would use up his six hours, or he could go down through muddy creeks that would be harder but also faster. And he might get to the hospital in time.
SPEAKER_04: I remember looking at my map on my phone and thinking, you know, the only option here is we need to go down one of these creek beds. So I'm crawling on my ass, crawling down these little waterfalls, escarpments, banks. But as we're going down, I'm getting weaker and weaker. And the throbbing now has moved all the way up to my groin area and eventually gets to a stage where I just want to sleep. But I did think I'm not going to make this. My number was up.
SPEAKER_07: After trudging his way through waterfalls and mud, Pete arrived at the edge of the rainforest and onto a beach where he saw the Coast Guard.
SPEAKER_04: They lay me down on the ground and I remember just closing my eyes and, you know, just hang on a little bit more, hang on a little bit more.
SPEAKER_07: Pete arrived at the hospital around three and a half hours after he was bitten. His heart was racing and he passed out. When he came to, he started documenting everything that was going on.
SPEAKER_05: Good morning or good afternoon to patient we are in the world. So I'll give you guys an update on what's happened over the last couple of days.
SPEAKER_07: By the time he got to the hospital, the snake venom had begun to destroy his muscles and blood vessels. Pete's leg had ballooned to double its size. And something else had happened. A warning. We're about to talk about genitals. My b****** and c*** go all big and black.
SPEAKER_04: It is not an uncommon thing that happens with snake bite victims.
SPEAKER_08: That doesn't mean it's not quite a shock.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, mate, I remember asking the nurse, like, is this normal? She'd come home and she'd say, yeah, kind of, maybe.
SPEAKER_07: To turn things around, the doctors had injected Pete with snake anti-venom. It raced through his body fighting back against the toxins. And quickly, it was clear that it had worked.
SPEAKER_03: Pete was going to be okay. And by day 11, he was up and about.
SPEAKER_04: Feeling a lot better today. So I started walking around for the first time I walked.
SPEAKER_07: And if you didn't get anti-venom, what would have happened? Oh, if I didn't get anti-venom, I would have died.
SPEAKER_04: No question. So, yeah, I was pretty lucky, eh?
SPEAKER_02: Well, that is a dramatic story, Wendy. But why are you telling us about it?
SPEAKER_08: So I really want to zoom into the part of the story where he gets that treatment, that
SPEAKER_07: stuff that saved his life.
SPEAKER_03: That's the anti-venom that neutralizes the toxins.
SPEAKER_07: Exactly. The anti-venom. So Pete got it and he survived. But many people around the world, they aren't so lucky. Some hundred thousand people die every year from snake bites. A hundred thousand. And you compare that to sharks, they kill maybe about six people globally every year. And so part of the reason that people are dying from snake bites is because they're not getting anti-venom fast enough. And this is for a bunch of reasons. But the one that I want to zoom in on is the way that we make anti-venom. Because the system we have now is this complicated, time-consuming, inefficient process that in many ways hasn't changed for more than a hundred years. Huh.
SPEAKER_03: OK, so then why is it so hard to make anti-venom?
SPEAKER_07: It all boils down to the thing that we're battling against. It's the stuff that we're trying to save ourselves from, the venom. It turns out that snake venom is truly nefarious. And I spoke to Christina Zdenek, who studies snake venom at the University of Queensland in Australia about this. And she kind of told me all the horrible ways that snake venom can kill you. It's like you're almost getting digested alive.
SPEAKER_09: So there's that.
SPEAKER_03: That sounds bad enough. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: We're just at the beginning. So snake venom can have up to 200 different toxins inside it.
SPEAKER_07: And each of those toxins have sort of slightly different tasks. So some start attacking your muscles, others attack your nerves. And sometimes two different toxins can work together to really mess us up.
SPEAKER_09: You've got one toxin that's pretty bad on its own and another one that's pretty bad on its own. But when you put them together and they like tag team against you. Whoa. Yeah. It's like, suck eggs.
SPEAKER_02: Suck eggs. I mean, look, that's from a scientist.
SPEAKER_08: So who are we to say? OK, so this is what she's talking about.
SPEAKER_07: This is how the snake venom is saying suck eggs. You could have one toxin that is going through your body and making it difficult for your blood to clot. And then at the same time, another toxin that is kind of making you bleed out, like it's punching holes in your blood vessels. You've got a hole caused by the toxins that's now open and you're spewing out red blood
SPEAKER_09: cells and plasma and platelets. But all of a sudden you can't stop the bleeding in that area.
SPEAKER_07: Christina says that sometimes people can bleed from all over their body.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Yeah. So like your gums from your eyes, sometimes your ears or your sphincter, your butthole. Oh Jesus. And even if it's really bad, there was a Taipan bite in Australia where a guy was, it seemed like he was sweating blood from his back. Oh. And so with your body's inability to clot and prevent this internal bleeding little bit by little bit really becomes a serious problem pretty quick.
SPEAKER_07: So basically what this means is to make an antidote against snake venom, we need to have something that can battle against that soup of toxins. And the thing is you actually need different anti-venoms for different snakes. So what saved Pete's life with the Fertilans anti-venom that wouldn't have worked if he'd gotten bit by, I don't know, a black mamba snake.
SPEAKER_03: And if you aren't Pete who can recognize a Fertilans, you could be in real trouble then.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, you actually could. And Pete took a photo of the snake. He knew it was a Fertilans because he's Pete, he's GI Joe, but they took a photo and showed it to the doctors at the hospital.
SPEAKER_03: So what happens if you take the wrong anti-venom?
SPEAKER_07: It probably wouldn't work. Like it wouldn't do anything. Bottom line, if they didn't have the Fertilans anti-venom for Pete, then he probably would have died. Now to be clear, if you take the correct anti-venom, it works and you know, this can save lives.
SPEAKER_03: So if you know the snake and there's an anti-venom for it, great. But you mentioned that making this anti-venom is a complicated old process. What are you talking about there?
SPEAKER_07: Okay. Let me take you on a little journey of how we make anti-venom today.
SPEAKER_07: It all starts with a kind of snake whisperer.
SPEAKER_01: Hello Wendy. So my name is Graybin Corrales.
SPEAKER_07: Graybin's worked with snakes for about a decade and he loves them, but these snakes don't always love him. Several years ago, a Sri Lankan green pit viper bit his pinky finger. When you look at your finger now, what does it look like?
SPEAKER_01: So I actually lose a little, little part of my finger. It's like one centimeter less than it used to be. Oh wow. I like it. It's really nice for scratching.
SPEAKER_07: You kind of got to have this attitude if you do what Graybin does. He works at a lab in Costa Rica called the Cloromiro Picado Institute and they make the anti-venom that saved Pete's life. Inside Graybin's workplace, there are rows of boxes filled with snakes.
SPEAKER_01: So we have about 500 snakes. What? Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Okay. So to cook up anti-venom, first up, we need venom from a snake. So to make that stuff for Pete, Graybin had to go to a box with a fertile lance in it.
SPEAKER_01: We know before we open the box, it's going to fight because they are very explosive. They strike many times.
SPEAKER_07: Graybin and his colleagues carefully take this writhing, angry snake out of the box using wooden poles. Then they sedate the snake by popping it in a basket with carbon dioxide gas. When it goes under, when it's sedated, how long do you have before it wakes up generally?
SPEAKER_01: Around five minutes.
SPEAKER_07: So what's going through your mind as you're doing this?
SPEAKER_01: I know it sounds kind of crazy, but nothing. Like in this moment, I have to be very focused. You're holding not just the snake, but your partner's life. In that moment, you cannot feel no fear. You have to be fearless.
SPEAKER_07: And then Graybin picks up the snake's head while his colleague holds the snake's body. And then Graybin milks the snake.
SPEAKER_03: What is milking the snake entail?
SPEAKER_07: I'm so glad you asked.
SPEAKER_08: Let me get this photo for you.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. Oh my goodness. Okay. They're holding the snake and there's a metal object prying the mouth open and the fangs are popped out and they're bringing the snake's head to a jar to collect the venom.
SPEAKER_07: Yes. So this is Graybin in the picture and you can see that his index finger is kind of over the top of the snake's head. What he's going to be squishing down on is the venom gland of the snake, which is like this pouch basically that's filled with venom.
SPEAKER_01: So we have to do a little massage. A massage, yeah.
SPEAKER_08: And I asked Graybin to try and tell me what this feels like as someone who's never milked
SPEAKER_07: a snake. And he just couldn't tell me. He was like, it's like nothing you've ever felt before. And the closest thing he got was he was like, it's a bit like if you imagine a slice of
SPEAKER_08: an orange under snakeskin and you're kind of like squishing the orange and then the juice comes out of the snake fangs.
SPEAKER_03: I see. I see. So it's a little tough. It's not like squishy. It has some resistance, but you push on the back of the head and it pushes out a little bit of venom.
SPEAKER_07: Yes. Wow. Yeah. And Graybin says that he can get around a teaspoon of venom from one fertile ant snake.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. And while he's massaged the venom out of the snake into a jar, what happens to the venom then?
SPEAKER_07: Okay. Here's where it gets kind of ridiculous because now... Here's where?
SPEAKER_02: Okay. All right. I was waiting for it to get ridiculous. Well, because here's where we need a second group of animals.
SPEAKER_08: Oh, goodness.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_08: And we're going to call him the cavalry because we literally need a farm of horses.
SPEAKER_03: Whoa. Okay. This is a turn.
SPEAKER_07: Sub labs do use sheep, but basically we need a large animal for reasons that will become
SPEAKER_08: clear later. But at the center where pizza anti-venom was made, there's about 120 horses.
SPEAKER_07: And there's also this guy, Jose Maria Gutierrez.
SPEAKER_00: They're really fantastic animals. Do they have names? Yes, they have names. In fact, there was one horse one time with my name, so I was very proud of that.
SPEAKER_07: Jose Maria is a professor at the Clotamiro Picado Institute. All right. So they're using all these horses because the anti-venom is actually going to be created inside the horse's body. And here's how. So Jose Maria's team will take that venom that Graven cooks out of the snake and then...
SPEAKER_00: You inject little amounts of venom into horses.
SPEAKER_07: And when a horse is first injected with, say, a tiny amount of venom, how do they react? Are they like, nay? Do you think it would be like a mosquito bite?
SPEAKER_00: I think it would be a little more than that because we are injecting a toxic substance.
SPEAKER_03: So does this hurt the horse?
SPEAKER_07: Well, we don't know for sure because the horse doesn't talk human speak. But from what we can tell, there's a little bit of swelling around where they do the injection. Nothing too serious, though. And they're just injecting tiny, tiny amounts. And what's going to happen next is that the horse is going to be injected with venom every two weeks or so. And what they're doing is actually waiting for the horse's immune system to start building up antibodies against the venom. That's what we're here to harness. That is actually the anti-venom. Another way to think about it is that you're kind of vaccinating the horses against the venom.
SPEAKER_00: And then after several of these injections, usually a couple of months, for instance, at that point, the horses are bled.
SPEAKER_07: They take around six liters of blood, which sounds like a lot, but Jose Maria says it's kind of the horse equivalent of donating a bag of blood at a blood bank.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's not so bad. You get a cookie, you get some orange juice, you're all right. You can have about your day.
SPEAKER_07: And this is actually why we need horses because they're these big animals that can donate a lot of blood. So after all this, we get the very thing that we've been waiting for, this miraculous drug that can fend off that super complicated cocktail of venom, the horse antibodies. They're purified, then freeze dried and put into a vial. And that is the stuff that gets injected into people like Pete.
SPEAKER_00: So these antibodies, these horse antibodies would get into the bloodstream. They find the toxins and then they block the action of the toxins.
SPEAKER_07: And so even though we say antibodies as if it's like one thing, within that vial of anti-venom, there could be 50 different antibodies that go after 50 different toxins in the blood.
SPEAKER_00: Exactly. Actually, it's a mixture of antibodies and there are antibodies against each of the toxins.
SPEAKER_07: And we need horses for this because they're these big animals and they can donate a lot of blood and horses actually have a similar enough immune system to us. So their antibodies work for humans. Jose Maria reckons that each bag of horse blood gets you enough anti-venom to treat around 15 people.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's a super cool process and fascinating, but it also seems just way too complicated.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And then just to add a tiny bit more complexity here is that to make anti-venom for all the venomous snakes in the world, you actually need to inject horses with this specific venom from all those snakes in the world. And this all means we've got labs in Indonesia, in India, in Egypt, in South Africa, in Australia that are just piled high with horses all getting injected with venom. And the thing is, we've basically made anti-venom the same way since the late 1800s.
SPEAKER_03: Wow. Basically nothing has changed in the time period, just the personnel and the horses, but it's the same process. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. I mean, there have been some improvements. Like in some cases, for example, the horses will go through this whole process and instead of just being injected with one kind of venom, they'll be injected with three different kinds of venom. So that means they'll make all these antibodies for then three different kinds of venom. I see.
SPEAKER_03: So it's like a little bit more efficient, but the process is still basically the same.
SPEAKER_09: Yes. I think that's fair. Yes.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So I guess the obvious question is, we've been doing this for a hundred plus years. Why are we still doing this way? Why haven't we come up with a better way to do this?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. It's a great question. And I think the dream for a lot of the people who work on this problem is to create a universal anti-venom. So something that you could make in a lab and that could be used for heaps of different kinds of snakes, for black mumbers, for fertile ants, for rattlesnakes, and you wouldn't need to go through this whole process so many times in so many different countries. Well, it sounds super easy.
SPEAKER_03: Why don't we just do that?
SPEAKER_08: It's not easy and it takes a lot of time and innovative thinking and the big thing is money. Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_07: And for a long time, no one was really putting a lot of money into this space and that's for all kinds of complicated reasons. But if we had to boil it down to a word, I would say that word was capitalism.
SPEAKER_07: So as we talked about snake bites kill around a hundred thousand people every year, this is a serious problem. But most of those deaths are happening in rural areas in Africa and Asia for people who can't afford a lot of money for medication and drug companies haven't put a lot of funding into this to try and make things better, basically. But since 2017, things have started to change.
SPEAKER_03: What happened in 2017?
SPEAKER_07: Well, the World Health Organization gave snake bites this special designation. They listed them as the most important kind of neglected tropical disease. This sounds terribly nerdy and in the weeds, but basically what it means for a disease is that it's kind of like winning an Oscar. You get extra attention, you get extra money. That is basically what's happened. We've seen this real change in what's going on. You see more research in this space. And after more than a hundred years of making antivenom with the horses and the snakes, now there's all these new ideas on the horizon. And Jose Maria says that this has all been huge.
SPEAKER_00: Things have really changed the world in general is paying much more attention to this disease. And it's really exciting.
SPEAKER_03: So now that snake bites have gotten the amount of attention they deserve, where are we with the universal antivenom? We're starting to see some really exciting things in the science.
SPEAKER_07: So one of them is that at the same time as snake bites have gotten all this extra attention, science has also developed these better tools to be able to look inside venom and analyze those toxins. And what we're realizing is that even though there are thousands of toxins doing slightly different things, you can actually group them together into families of toxins and then try and tackle those families and it's a much easier target. You can think about it like this. Are you a basketball fan?
SPEAKER_02: Not especially, but continue on.
SPEAKER_08: Excellent. Huge basketball fan in the corner here. All right. So this is kind of how I've been thinking about the way that they're tackling this universal antivenom problem. If say you're in the NBA and you've got to play against hundreds of players in the league, one way to do that would be to try and figure out the defense of all the individual players.
SPEAKER_07: You're Curry, LeBron, and even all the middle level players and all the ones on the bench. Even Boban, you've got to work out what's going on with him. Well, of course.
SPEAKER_03: I think about Boban all the time. But I guess contextually, I'm to assume that Boban is not exactly a LeBron or a Curry.
SPEAKER_07: No, but he's doing his best.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, great. Exactly. So you've got to work out each player's individual tricks.
SPEAKER_07: Instead, what we're doing now is we're just looking at what the big dangerous players are doing and grouping them together and then working out a defense against them. So just focusing on Steph Curry and all the Curry copycats out there.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, that makes sense. So if you know that the toxin hits a lot of three pointers, you're basically making a medicine to deal with that particular attack. That's the anti three pointer medicine. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. And so has this approach been working so far? You know, it's been going well.
SPEAKER_07: So for example, there's this big family of enzymes that are swimming inside venom. And what they do is damage blood vessels, and they're called metalloproteinases. And they're found in vipers all around the world. And so scientists have now been searching for a way to basically stop metalloproteinases from working. This is one of those scientists. Go on, introduce yourself. Yeah, so I'm Laura Albalescu.
SPEAKER_06: I work at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
SPEAKER_07: And scientists like Laura are trying to figure out how to protect us against that big family of nasty enzymes. And to do that, she's been thinking, well, what do the enzymes need to survive? And they've discovered that one of the things these enzymes need is zinc. And Laura says there's actually already a drug on the market that messes with zinc. So Laura and her team took this drug and then combined it with another drug. And then they enlisted some heroic little white mice and injected them with some snake venom from some of the most dangerous snakes in the world.
SPEAKER_06: We are looking at vipers from Africa, from India, from Central America.
SPEAKER_07: They waited a bit to let the venom set in, then gave them the concoction, the two drugs. Now if this didn't work, most likely, these mice would all die within a four hour window.
SPEAKER_06: But instead, the team saw something different.
SPEAKER_07: The mice started moving around, sniffing. They seem to be recovering.
SPEAKER_06: These animals are still alive and look healthy. And how are you feeling? Yeah, I was feeling great. I didn't expect it to work so well against venoms that are so different from each other. Yeah, to work for a fer-de-lance from Central America and then an Asian, you had saw-scaled
SPEAKER_07: viper.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. How big is that in the world of anti-venom?
SPEAKER_06: This is amazing. It's really great. It's really important. So there you have it.
SPEAKER_07: After 100 years of needing to inject horses with all these different kinds of venom, Laura's drug has worked. We did it. I have a feeling that we did not do it.
SPEAKER_02: That's not how science works.
SPEAKER_03: One clinical test doesn't do it.
SPEAKER_07: No. And actually, one of the mice did die 18 hours later. But, but, but, but this tactic is actually showing so much promise that there's already a clinical trial in humans underway that's focusing on another drug that messes with zinc.
SPEAKER_03: That's great. And this is a completely different approach. I mean, using drugs rather than using antibodies from another animal is like, it's completely novel.
SPEAKER_07: No, exactly. I mean, it's novel in the world of snake bites, but it's what we do for basically every other disease out there. And you know, the anti-venom that we have now, it does work when you can get it. And so scientists are thinking that maybe in the shortish term, we might have these new and exciting treatments that kind of work alongside the anti-venom from the horses.
SPEAKER_03: It's funny because like, you know, we've spent a year with COVID-19 and we saw a series of vaccines go from design to trial to approval in under a year. And that's not how science normally works ever. Usually it's a process where you try things, lots of mice die and after years of experiments, I mean, maybe we have a small breakthrough. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, I think the COVID-19 story, it could tell us two things and time will tell. Perhaps this virus was actually surprisingly easy to make a vaccine for. And we were kind of lucky and a nastier virus could have come around that we couldn't have had a vaccine for. But maybe the other lesson here is that if scientists get bucket loads of money and basically
SPEAKER_08: you encourage nerds from all around the world to tackle a problem, that they could solve
SPEAKER_07: it very quickly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. It's like a Manhattan Project or, you know, sending a person to the moon. You know, it's just like if you put enough money and will behind it, you can make it happen.
SPEAKER_07: Exactly. Exactly. And so maybe that will happen with snake anti-venom too, if enough scientists and there's enough excitement around this area.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. So I have one more question before we go. Like what happened to Pete? You know, he got bit by this snake. He nearly died. Is he still traipsing around as this conservationist GI Joe?
SPEAKER_07: Yes. There's no change in Pete whatsoever. He is still in Costa Rica.
SPEAKER_08: He's going to be patrolling the jungle soon. And he said his leg is doing all right. In the meantime, he actually still holds a little place in his heart for the snake that
SPEAKER_07: got him.
SPEAKER_04: I'm happy that guy's still alive and up there.
SPEAKER_07: So you don't hold a grudge against the snakey? No, I don't hold a grudge against the snake.
SPEAKER_04: He was just doing snake things.
SPEAKER_03: Pete has a good attitude. Thank you, Wendy.
SPEAKER_08: Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_03: More strange, fascinating snake content with Wendy Zuckerman after this.
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SPEAKER_07: Yes, please. So as I've been researching this episode, I realized there were all these things about
SPEAKER_08: snakes that I had never thought about before. Like they're quite beautiful.
SPEAKER_07: They have all these different colors on their scales. And I also realized how little science knows about some, what I would have thought were pretty basic snake things.
SPEAKER_02: Like for example.
SPEAKER_07: Like scientists still aren't sure if snakes can hear.
SPEAKER_03: Like hear it all?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. So Dr. Christina Zdenek, who we heard from in the first half of the show, she's like, you know, we know snakes can feel vibrations. That's what we're taught. I don't know if, I actually don't know if you're taught this in a, but every Australian knows that if you see a snake, you got to like stamp your feet, you know, to try and get them to feel. Okay. So we know snakes can feel vibrations, but we didn't know whether they could hear sounds through the air. And a big reason for that is that they don't have external ears. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: Which ever since she told me that, I just can't stop imagining a snake with external
SPEAKER_08: ears.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that is the only way we'd really know is if they had big old ears, not on their side of their heads. And so, so because they don't have this, you know, for a long time, some scientists were
SPEAKER_08: like, well, we just don't think they can hear.
SPEAKER_07: And then Christina heard this kind of amazing story from one of her colleagues, Damien Canduso.
SPEAKER_07: And I want to tell you, I mean, in some ways, it's like, I can't, I can't imagine a more
SPEAKER_08: stereotypical Australian story. So I am nervous to bring this to more Americans, but...
SPEAKER_02: That you're in a safe space here.
SPEAKER_07: Thank you. Thank you. So this guy, he sometimes makes the sound effects for films. And he noticed that while he was working on what he called low end frequencies, so think like bombs exploding, you know, that like, and like earthquakes where you hear those tremors in a cinema. And so while he was creating those sounds, he would notice that brown snakes would start slithering next to his house from seemingly nowhere. He didn't know why. It could have been a coincidence. It could have been that they were feeling vibrations or maybe because they really could hear the sound waves through the air. And so he ends up telling this story to Christina. And Christina was like, yeah, you know, there are a few studies suggesting like maybe snakes can hear, you know, still this huge debate. And so just this year, they teamed up and decided to test it.
SPEAKER_09: We've got a soundproof room and we've got 19 captive snakes.
SPEAKER_07: What her team does is they take the snake out of its holding container, which is essentially like a rubbish bin with some holes in the lid, grabbing the snake with a hook and then
SPEAKER_09: with his hand when it's safe.
SPEAKER_07: And then they put the snake into this soundproof room.
SPEAKER_09: We've got a half wall, which we've just secured the door for, for security.
SPEAKER_07: Christina sent me a photo. It's literally fancier than the Gimlet Studios and definitely more secure. And then they give the snake some time to settle. So then they play some sounds through this very special setup they have that's basically designed so that the sounds come through the air and they don't make vibrations on the floor.
SPEAKER_03: I see.
SPEAKER_07: Right. And then she's basically recording the snake's behavior.
SPEAKER_09: Just started the sound. She dropped a lower jaw, which is quite interesting, a defensive pose. And now she's flicking her tongue and slightly moving around, head raised off the ground, peering into the distance, still flicking the tongue, not making any large movements.
SPEAKER_03: So what did they find? Do snakes actually hear the sound?
SPEAKER_07: Okay. She's still analyzing the data, but here's what she told me about it. There's some very interesting behaviors.
SPEAKER_09: I think it will be clear, at least with some of the individuals, that they're absolutely going to be aware of the sound.
SPEAKER_07: What I think is pretty cool with what Christina is starting to see is that the behaviors she's seeing is really dependent on the individual snake. Right?
SPEAKER_08: And so here's what she said about that.
SPEAKER_09: How they respond, I think it seems to be based on the individual personality, whether they're a type of a timid snake or whether they're more defensive and willing to give more defensive behaviors. And by that, a snake would be dropping their lower jaw to show their fangs or hissing. Had you thought about snakes as having personalities?
SPEAKER_09: Yes. We see it all the time. So my husband and I, we have 24 snakes as pets. And so we see it on a very intimate level. One snake doesn't like to be touched. Another one could care less. One basically falls asleep in your hands. He's like this old man. He's literally 21 years old. He's like 2.2 meter coastal taipan. Like they're very predictable in their personalities.
SPEAKER_07: And so to take this back to the experiment, so in the tape where we were hearing about the experiment, Christina's describing the snake that's hissing and getting all pissy at the sound. That's a coastal taipan. But it's not this sleepy guy that she's talking about here. That sleepy guy was also in the experiment. And she said that he basically fell asleep when he heard the sounds.
SPEAKER_08: So this is a perfect example of how she's seeing these different reactions.
SPEAKER_07: By the way, just to get a sense of how big that sleepy snake is, she said 2.2 meters. It's about the same height as Bobon, the basketball player.
SPEAKER_03: It all comes back to Bobon.
SPEAKER_02: That's fantastic. Did you ever think of snakes as having personalities?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I had a snake and I didn't have a lot of exposure. That one seemed to have a personality. It was named Chewbacca. It was a corn snake. But I didn't have a lot of other snakes to compare it to. So it had personality, but I didn't realize that it may be different. It was from other corn snakes. But Chewy was a great snake and would escape on occasion and then show up four days later like right next to the cage. Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_08: Like a cat. Like cats do that.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. Yeah. So it doesn't surprise me that they have some personality. The fact that one would get really exercised upon watching a Christopher Nolan movie and another one would be completely nonplussed by it is new to me, though. That's fantastic.
SPEAKER_08: And new to science, I think.
SPEAKER_03: I like it. Thank you.
SPEAKER_06: Thanks.
SPEAKER_03: A version of this episode can be heard on the wonderful podcast Science Vs., a production of Gimlet, a Spotify company. I'm a huge Science Vs. fan. I've been a fan since the very first episode that I heard when they were just a little Australian show. And now they're this big global phenomenon. I'm so excited we had this chance to work with them. Special thanks this week to Wendy Zuckerman and the whole team at Science Vs., including Blythe Turrell, Rose Rimmler, Meryl Horn, Nick Delrose, Michelle Dang, and Taylor White. Also special thanks to Maxwell Simeon at Gimlet. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, music by our director of sound, Sean Rial, sound mix by Bryson Barnes, fact checking by Erika Akiko Howard. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lay, Christopher Johnson, Abby Madone, Katie Mingle, Sophia Glazgar, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is scattered across the continent right now, but will always be centered in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We're a founding member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artist owned podcasts in the world. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. And you can find our home on the internet at 99pi.org. Radio Topia from PRX.
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