The mere suggestion of this creature
strikes fear into the hearts of many.
Legendary serpent.
Stealthy predator.
This king of the rattlesnakes won
his reputation for good reason.
In truth, his world is one
full of danger,
one that we know little about.
Look at that!
One man has set out to change that
and nearly dies doing it.
Dr. Bruce Means ventures through
the inland waterways
that went from Georgia
through Florida's panhandle.
A freelance scientist, he is often
on his own and prefers it that way.
For 25 years now,
Means has pioneered
the study of North America's
largest and most feared viper.
Means journeys into this
personal heart of darkness on a mission.
He fears for the fate of
the venomous snake he is after,
the Eastern diamondback rattler,
a proud and complex recluse slithering
toward the black hole of extinction.
For over 50 years,
I've wondered in nature by myself,
sometimes barefooted,
but usually with just my sandals on.
Where I'm heading
takes some getting used to.
There's marsh and muck,
but on the other side
there's this paradise
where the longleaf pine forest grows
and this special creature
I love so much survives.
Diamondbacks are almost
impossible to find.
Sometimes in the summer, though,
you can use the gopher tortoise
for a guide.
Pregnant snakes
often make their temporary homes
in the long burrows
that the turtle digs.
So if you find a tortoise, he can
sometimes lead you to a diamondback.
There! There's the gopher tortoise
about two feet down.
The gopher tortoise shovels out
his own burrow,
creating a home for hundreds of
other creatures large and small.
There's another gopher of sorts,
the gopher frog.
The Florida mouse and its pups.
And something we've been
searching for, something menacing.
Incredibly, this is also the home of
the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake.
A serpent scaled in diamonds,
it is among the most highly evolved
of all snakes,
among the most dangerous,
and among the most unlikely roommate
any tortoise ever had.
The perfect odd couple.
Diamondbacks only prey on
warm-blooded animals,
so the coldblooded tortoise
is safe from the snake.
Still, the snake is not harmless and
the tortoise is not taking any chances.
The Eastern diamondback rattlesnake
is as American as the bald eagle.
It is the largest rattlesnake
in the world.
This is a singular serpent.
Many snakes swim, but few take
to surfing like this rattler.
It seems as at home at sea
as it is on land.
It is the king of American snakes
more forbidding,
almost invisible and utterly silent,
but for its warning.
Its signature, the menacing rattle,
signaling the nearness of sudden death.
The snake's trademark
is made up of scales
left behind each time
the snake sheds its skin.
They scratch together when shaken.
Amazingly, the frequency is the same
as an ambulance siren.
The rattle evolved in
the ancient dance of survival.
Twelve thousand years ago,
a menagerie of strange animals
roamed the Atlantic Coast
mastodons, lamas and bison,
like this one,
were as plentiful as deer.
All are gone now from the region
but for this survivor,
the Eastern diamondback.
Having melted into his environment
through camouflage,
the viper may have evolved a signal
to spook off these big mammals.
Instead of being trampled, the snake
rattled out a warning don't tread on me.
Like the snake,
Means prefers to be left alone.
So often, it's just the doctor
and the diamondback,
man on snake,
and sometimes snake on man.
I had hoped to be one of the few
herpetologists
who studied venomous animals
and to say at the end of a career
that I had never been bitten.
Means didn't get his wish.
He suffered his first bite
in a laboratory accident
more than two decades ago.
Then a few years later, he paddled out
to a distant and deserted barrier island
off the Florida coast
to take a wildlife inventory.
The hazards of meeting up
with a killer snake
were the furthest thing from his mind.
I was wandering through the dune of
vegetation
and I encountered a rattle snake
about a three and a half foot,
beautiful looking female.
Had my camera,
so I start taking photographs.
The snake wanted to start fleeing
and I grabbed it by the tail
and threw it up into the open,
and it coiled up,
so I got more photographs.
And at that point,
I should have been satisfied,
but for some crazy reason,
and I'll never know why,
I decided I wanted to
capture the snake.
I got in front of the snake, and
I'm trying to pin the head of the snake
when it struck at me and I misjudged
how far the snake could strike.
It could strike
further than I realized.
And it, one fang got me
on the forefinger.
I looked at my forefinger and there
was a pinprick of blood there,
just beginning, a little jewel of red.
I thought to myself,
"I cannot believe I let this happen.
When he was bitten in the safety
of his lab,
he collapsed in just four minutes,
his legs rubbery and useless.
Now, he faced a half mile trek
back to his canoe.
He had no communications and no choice.
The scientist in him understood
that with every step he took,
his chances at survival dimmed,
because the long march pumped
the venom faster through his body.
And he knew from his last experience
that the legs go first.
The entire time it took me
to get myself to safety,
there was one thing that
overwhelmingly occupied the whole episode:
I kept thinking, "You're gonna do it.
Don't let this fear get you.
Don't panic. Keep going."
And I set my teeth, I mean,
I literally clenched my teeth,
and I said, "I'm gonna do it."
As the pain spread,
the paralysis set in,
and he still had to paddle
nearly a mile across the channel
separating him from the mainland.
Almost 30 minutes had passed.
Means knew from experience
time was running out.
I had many thoughts of my life
passing, you know, before me,
and most of all I worried about
my children and my wife,
about what they would think
if I would not make it.
And worst of all,
here I was in a canoe,
and suppose that I panicked
in the middle of the water and drowned
and disappeared and they'd never
have known what had happened to me.
So I kept that thing in mind,
"I'm gonna make it.
I'm gonna make it."
And I get all the way to shore.
So when I got on the shore,
I tried to get out of the boat,
I couldn't move my legs.
I was totally paralyzed
from the hips down.
I just threw myself over
in the boat into the water.
My stuff dumps out into the water.
I pull myself out of the boat,
and didn't bother with it;
it floated off a ways from me.
And I literally clawed
my way to my car.
When I got to the car, I had
a problem getting the key in the door,
and my car happened to have
an idiosyncrasy about opening up,
but fortunately it opened for me.
I dragged myself up into the car,
pulled myself onto the seat.
Then I found out I couldn't drive.
It's a stick shift.
So I had to grab my right leg,
pull it in, put it on the accelerator,
grab my left leg,
pull it in on the clutch.
I pushed the clutch in,
started the car, gave it some gas.
And I was able to twist and
pull it down and I popped the clutch.
I kept it in first gear and I tore off
down the road towards help
not being able to shift,
so I was in first gear,
going, "Rrrrrr," down the road.
The few minutes it took to drive
to Survey Headquarters
were an endless nightmare.
All I could do is just
turn the key off and let it,
"Chugchugchug" to a stop,
open the door.
And then I had to let myself down
onto the pavement.
The pain was like salt poured
in an open wound,
and worse, he was growing
weaker and weaker.
No longer able to drag himself
over the hot knobby pavement,
he had to roll in order to move,
but he couldn't roll in a straight line.
So he plotted a circle across
the burning parking lot to his last,
best chance for survival.
Means reached his destination only to
discover that his ordeal had just begun.
Nearly an hour had passed
since the rattler sank its fangs
in Bruce Means's hand,
and now the scientist was discovering
that the cure was as bad as the bite.
Twenty-six vials of antivenin
were pumped into his veins
to stem the tide of
the snake's poison.
But the medicine proved
an even more lethal toxin,
because Means was allergic to it.
People around me could see
the twitching that goes on
a thing called muscular fasciculation.
The hair follicles around the mouth
and I'm fully bearded
move in a circular motion.
My whole face was involved in these
strange rhythmical movements of the skin,
which are characteristic of
Eastern diamondback snake bites.
He spent ten days hovering
between recovery and death,
often in intensive care, as
his body rebelled against the antivenin.
But he survived.
And less than 24 hours
after he left the hospital,
he was back at work, back to
the snakes that nearly killed him.
What is the allure?
Why is Means willing to risk
the snake's fatal attraction?
You know,
this is a magnificent creature.
It's at the pinnacle of evolution
and we know so little about it.
Apart from its beauty and its mystery,
it has a rightful place in nature.
And now, it's at risk.
It's actually a very benign creature.
It likes to lie coiled up
and hidden waiting for food and,
once in a rare while, for a mate.
The survival of the Eastern diamondback
depends on bogs like this
and on these dwindling
stands of longleaf pines,
a once vast torrent of forest
that tumbled south
and west from Virginia to Texas.
These lofty but threatened woodlands
sustain an immense web of wildlife
and are the keystone to the
Eastern diamondback's survival.
The powerful connection between
the pines and the diamondbacks
was little understood when Bruce Means
arrived in Florida's woodlands.
The snake was feared and hunted,
but never studied.
More than 20 years ago,
Means pioneered the use
of radio signals
to track the Eastern diamondback's
behavior.
He carefully introduced a harmless,
mouse sized transmitter
into the sedated snakes,
which beamed their whereabouts.
In summer, he combs the forests
for his latest subject.
At this point, sometimes I get
so close that I can't see them.
They're camouflaged very well
in the grass.
I have to be very careful
I don't step on one.
Ah, there it is. Whew!
A big one.
Little head. Whoa!
Big body.
Hello? Who are you?
Whoa, is he heavy.
Look at the size. Oh!
This is a big snake, but it's not
nearly as big as rattlesnakes
get the Eastern diamondback.
This guy is about four and a half
feet long and I would estimate
about five and a half
to six pounds in weight.
They come a lot bigger.
A ten pound snake, is not uncommon,
which would be almost twice his bulk.
And I've known of 12 and 13 pound
snakes.
The next thing I need to do is be sure
that I don't endanger myself
and also that I am careful not
to cause him to hurt himself,
so I'll partially narcotize him
by putting an inhalant
and it'll take about five minutes
for him to become totally placid.
I'm not going to put him entirely out.
And then we can work with him.
Let's see how he's doing. Yeah.
What is important here is
I know he's under sufficiently
for me to work with him
when he's lost his writhing response,
which you see him lying
on his back now.
Now he's not out.
I have to be quite careful with him,
anyway,
but he's probably out sufficiently for
me to flip him over and then capture him.
Alright, notice he's not thrashing.
He would be doing that were
he not somewhat groggy.
So the first thing I do is
get a measurement
and he is 120 millimeters
is now rattle length.
And his tail now that rattling
indicates he's not,
he's quickly coming out of his
narcosis, but I have his head in my hand.
So it's 1200 millimeters in length
and 120 tail,
that's about 10 percent of the body
length, which is about right for a male.
Females have about 10 percent
less tail length.
This is a young snake.
This animal may only be
in his third year of life.
That's amazing.
A lot of people don't realize a snake
that big could be a juvenile.
But this one's probably just
sexually mature.
Could you imagine what one twice
that size in volume would look like?
The Eastern diamondback
really represents the epitome
of snake evolution.
And there are several reasons for that.
One is that it has this remarkable
heat sensitive pit right there,
which is an advancement among snakes.
Another, of course, is this elaborate
venom and fang apparatus.
The venom is a complex liqueur having
several different proteins in it
depending on the species, more.
Each one of those proteins
has various functions.
Many of them are enzymes.
They break down the tissue or
in the case of the Eastern diamondback,
it actually has quite a bit of nerve
attacking components in its venom.
So the initial use that the venom
is put to is to immobilize its prey,
so it doesn't go too far away
and the snake can go find it.
The snake employs its fierce weapons
with surgical precision.
And it strikes with lightening speed.
Its jaws are lashed by sinew
and powerful muscles
that snap open the fangs
like a switchblade.
Sacks similar to salivary glands
pump the venom
through hollow channels
just like a hypodermic needle.
Though the bite is instantaneous,
the snake pumps its venom several times
to force a lethal dose
into its victim.
After locating its prey, the snake
begins the laborious process of feeding.
And it always starts with the head.
First one half of the jaw,
then the other walk along
the prey as it is ingested.
Small sharp teeth in the palate
and lower jaw curve backward
sliding over the food, pulling it in.
The body moves forward
like an accordion
as muscles in the throat
draw the prey down.
A full grown snake could survive
for a year
on three or four lunches
like this one.
Though bitten and nearly killed
by the Eastern diamondback,
Means says his research makes plain
the snake doesn't deserve
its menacing reputation.
The Eastern diamondback rattlesnake
is not a sinister animal.
A lot of people might think that.
They rely on several mechanisms
to avoid your presence.
The first is camouflage.
There's a rattlesnake close by.
Normally you can't see the snake,
because well, I know where it is
but he's hidden in the grass
and they're very difficult to see,
so the rattlesnake is not rattling.
And they don't want to rattle
because they don't want to
attract your attention.
Human beings will go over and kill it.
But watch what happens
if I walk slowly towards the snake,
and it perceives that I'm aware of it,
which it does now,
you can hear it rattling.
This snake doesn't have a huge rattle
string, but he's beginning to rattle.
In fact, he's not rattling a lot.
This is a very complacent animal.
I might have to be a little
more threatening.
You see that he's orienting to me,
as I walk around him,
his head's turning.
Oh, this guy's quite complacent.
He can stick and reach me
if he were to strike now.
Now if I back away from him,
he'll stop rattling,
which he's done.
Generally, they rely on camouflage.
Interestingly, I touched
the snake to stimulate it,
it did jump, but it still
didn't strike me.
And it'll probably strike
at this point.
Look at that. It did sort of
lethargically as I passed it.
This is sort of the common, average
behavior of the Eastern diamondback.
Some will strike,
but in general most of them don't.
They're not the sinister animal
that people think.
And they by no means chase people.
They don't go after you.
So how can you loathe an animal
that really doesn't have dirty deeds
in its heart?
August is a brief but crucial passage
for the Eastern diamondback.
Males are on the move now trailing
the pheromones of females.
More than ever, the males are out
in the open and exposed to danger.
The females are less restless
during this time,
awaiting a mate or preparing to give
birth near the safety of a burrow.
Birds of prey are the curse of
the diamondback.
From the treetops, a red-tailed hawk
can spy a snake a half a mile away.
A pregnant diamondback,
storing fat for the dozen young
maturing inside her body,
would make for a feast.
Sensing danger overhead
sends the tortoise
and the pregnant rattler
down into the safety of the burrow.
The hawk is undaunted and
the male is still in the open.
Its talons over fangs.
The hawk dances gingerly
around its dangerous prey.
The victor shrouds
its victim from intruders.
For this rattler,
the mating game is over.
The gopher tortoise's
well engineered burrow
is both a safe haven and a refuge.
The tunnel usually slopes
some six feet underground,
but an ambitious turtle
will tunnel 30 feet or more.
Over time, as many as 350 creatures
may come and go as tenants here.
The gopher frog calls this hole
in the ground home.
Like the tortoise, it's cold blooded
and so it's safe from the diamondback.
The sheepish looking gesture is really
a reflex protecting its delicate eyes.
The barging gopher tortoise leaves
no doubt who is landlord of this burrow.
He bulldozes past the other tenants
who are preparing to head out
into the night.
Though the turtle's tunnel is
little more than a narrow hallway,
the warm-blooded Florida Mouse
occupies a one room apartment
dug into the wall.
It's tiny, keyhole sized entryway
keeps out the big diamondback.
Though coming and going is
still a risk,
she and the snake tend to keep
different hours.
The diamondback usually hunts by day
and the Florida mouse is nocturnal.
In the warmest months,
the Eastern diamondback may stay out
after hours, but not to hunt.
Instead, it will find a spot to
curl up and wait out the night.
As the orange light of day
parts the clouds,
the diamondback nestles motionless
at the base of a tree.
Rattlers are ambush hunters,
using patience, stillness and stealth.
A family of squirrels ventures
out into the day,
unaware of the deadly
interloper nearby.
The fleeing squirrel
has moments to live.
No matter where the squirrel dies,
the snake will find it.
I know when I was bitten,
my body fell apart.
As big as I am, I had a chance.
But for a small creature like the
squirrel, it's all over in an instant.
How the snake tracks its wounded prey
is not yet clear.
Means thinks a stricken animal
gives off a special scent,
a unique signature
that distinguishes it.
Food goes down headfirst, so the feet
fold easily through the gaping jaws.
The diamondback gets its meal,
and there will be no more tales
of alarm from this squirrel.
The diamondback brought a subtle
advantage to its encounter
with the squirrel, a sixth sense,
hunting through its heat sensing pits.
Means wants to understand the world
as the snake perceives it.
The growing tip of
the longleaf pine is warm.
That's interesting.
A pioneer in research, he has embarked
on a new series of experiments.
He uses a thermal camera to reveal
a world invisible to humans,
a world of heat radiating
all around us.
Here is my imprint of my hand,
right on the ground,
where you can see nothing
but leaves with the naked eye.
It's absolutely different.
Now for an experiment, I have
brought a cute little laboratory rat.
Good morning you cute little rat.
Are you ready to be a star?
We're gonna put him down
on the ground
to see what he looks like
through this infrared camera.
Alright, Mr. Rat, wander around.
Whoa!
This is fantastic.
The thermal camera dramatically shows
how heat from the warm-blooded mouse
strips it of both cover and camouflage.
While no one knows what the snake
actually perceives,
the camera offers visual evidence
of the Eastern diamondback's advantage
in hunting warm-blooded prey.
For the Eastern diamondback,
heat is an ally and in surprising ways.
Lightning is as common to Florida
as coastline,
and the bolts become firebrands
setting the forest aflame.
The snake depends on these fires,
because they sustain
the longleaf pine forest,
the diamondback's principal habitat.
Fire burns out underbrush,
allowing for new growth.
The diamondback is well adapted
to these fiery conditions
and seeks refuge from the flames.
This cotton mouth was not so lucky.
There are the quick and the dead
and the well adapted.
After the fire, a mosaic of ash
and old growth patch the earth.
A turtle navigates the embers
trying to find food.
Within a few days, fresh greens
will have punched through the ashes
and new palmetto sprays
will have fanned out.
This is the miracle of
the longleaf pine forest.
Here the role of fire is not to kill;
it's to rejuvenate.
Even tortoises seem to sprout
from the soil after a fire
newborns hungry for the green shoots.
August in the piney woods
is a season of upheaval.
And the pregnant diamondback
feels it most.
A month before labor
she hunkers down,
feeding stops, movement stops
for the most part.
Labor lasts 12 exhausting hours,
as she gives birth to a clutch of
a dozen little diamondbacks.
Though the young are carried
within her body and born live,
they hatch from sacks identical to eggs
but without the finishing touch
the shell.
From the beginning, young rattlers
can deliver a lethal dose of venom
and soon bear the first button of
their baby rattle.
Conventional wisdom says snakes
don't make good mothers.
But Means believes
Eastern diamondbacks may.
The mother stays close to the clutch
in the first crucial days of life,
although the reason may
simply be exhaustion.
Deadly as the diamondback may be,
they grow into a world of treachery.
Few survive their first year,
for danger lurks in every direction
even from other snakes.
The kingsnake is known as
a muscular hunter
a constrictor that kills
by suffocating its prey.
Tongue flicks sample the air.
The diamondback senses a dangerous foe
the kingsnake, dinner.
The kingsnake gets its name
because it eats other snakes
and it's immune to
its opponent's venom.
Pinning the diamondback
in its corkscrew coils,
it crushes its victim,
than swallows it whole.
It leaves the trophy till last.
More treacherous than the snake's
natural predators the commercial hunter.
While against the law, practices
like this go on to this day.
Hunters are paid $10 a foot for
diamondbacks, as much as $60 a snake.
Outwitted, the rattler is lured into
betraying itself
with its last line of defense.
The hunter listens
for the telltale rattle.
A spray of gasoline chokes the burrow.
The snake is desperate
to escape the fumes
and abandons the sanctuary of the
tunnel, winding up in a bucket.
The burrow that had harbored so much
life may now become a wasteland.
No one knows how long the gas
fumes may linger.
If the snakes are not killed outright,
many are brought to
rattlesnake roundups,
which have been entertaining
audiences for decades.
It's 39 years we've had this roundup.
It's a way of controlling
the snakes down in this country.
And I don't really know if it has
that much of an impact,
but we seem to get a lot of
snakes every year.
Each year, Eastern diamondbacks
are captured for roundups
that attract crowds as large as 25,000.
That's essentially a diamond there.
Yeah, we come up here
for rattlesnake burgers.
They tell us they're really good.
Yeah, you know
I had to say chicken. Chicken?
Then I said take the alligator too.
People want to cook them,
kill them and wear them.
They even want their venom, which
the roundups milk at bargain prices
for medical researchers.
Means attends roundups to take a head
count of the rattlers,
trying to gauge the impact these
events have on the Eastern diamondback.
The snakes are treated badly.
They're exploited for money,
then killed, with no thought for them
as a renewable resource.
Worse than the roundup, says Means,
is the skin trade.
Hides become fashion.
It is an ironic end
for the Eastern diamondback,
the magical camouflage
that had hid the snake so well
now calls attention to its wearer.
This is out of control and needs
much more regulation.
Even alligators are licensed
and tagged now.
But dead diamondbacks,
they're treated as party favors.
Roundups give people
the wrong message.
The truth is these snakes are
not expendable, they're not evil.
People need to realize the value of
what they're destroying.
This is already a snake
hard pressed to survive.
But roundups and snake skin
boots are just one threat.
Humans keep upping the ante
on the snake's future,
and dangers are everywhere.
In the summer, hot highways become
killing gauntlets or worse
burning barriers, cutting the snake
off from its habitat.
Little more than two percent of the
rattlers' ancient territory remains.
Humanity's pattern of destruction,
the precious longleaf pinelands replaced
by regiments of future two by fours,
plowed over by agriculture,
slashed apart by highways,
and fragmented into withering islands,
the leftovers of development.
There may not be enough land left
to the snake to sustain it,
let alone provide a future.
And as the snake goes,
so go his neighbors.
What the diamondback needs
is a better image,
more public relations, some fans.
One of the roundups in the Eastern
United States has done a wonderful job
of this very sort of thing.
They don't even call it
a roundup anymore,
because they do not roundup snakes.
It's called a festival.
And they are very frightened
of people.
If you come across one,
he'll usually coil up,
shake his tail,
and back away from you.
And they put emphasis on
environmental education.
They have just as many people
that come to the festival.
They'll crawl down in there
and live there
with the turtle and just stay there.
Every now and then something
will spook a rabbit,
he'll run down the hole, he'll get
a meal served to him like meal service.
These civic organizations that are
involved in running the festival
in the communities generate just
as much income as any of these roundups
that put the accent on beautization
and misuse of the creatures.
It may be that it's already too late
for the Eastern diamondback.
While well adapted to
the trials of nature,
the torments of humans are
pushing the rattler to its limit.
Means fears that before we fully
understand the snake's role
in the environment, it may be gone.
But even he acknowledges
that the snakes
have found some surprising ways
to survive.
Florida's torrents flood the lowlands
and tiny streams become channels.
Even the tortoise goes with the flow,
if sometimes reluctantly.
The hazards of the deep abound.
Carried along on the stream,
the hard-pressed animals take
with them the future.
Means believes the snake's
survival skills might help it endure.
Swimming makes it mobile.
Streams become highways,
escape routes from the destruction
caused by development,
and these streams sometimes
ferry snakes all the way out to sea.
The Eastern diamondback island hops.
It's been found way out as far as
the The Dry Tortugas.
That's about 120 miles
from the Florida Coast.
This could be the snake's salvation,
but like everywhere else,
the islands are prime real estate
for development.
Propelled far and fast
beyond their normal range,
the diamondbacks become pilgrims
protected by their isolation.
Where the snake's habitat
is overrun by development,
the flood carries survivors
to another, more welcoming place,
their distant island,
though it may be full of fiddler crabs.
Still, on his own,
Means scours the barrier islands,
studying the snakes
in their remote habitats.
The Eastern diamondback is likely
to be an endangered species very soon.
It has a special role in nature
and it won't take much for it
to be lost forever.
The snake simply needs a place
to live and the opportunity to survive.
Even after 25 years of research,
Means says his efforts
remain a work in progress.
What's clear is that the snake
plays an essential role in nature,
both as predator and prey.
Means's aim is to help us know
this animal before it's too late.
It's my greatest wish that
in my lifetime,
I'll still be able to
come to places like this
and see the
Eastern diamondback rattlesnake.
I hope that continues.
Bruce Means reminds us
that the diamondback's rattle
may be more than a threat,
that it may have a deeper meaning,
that nature is sending us a message,
"Don't tread on me."