1 V-E-N-O-M

You are sleeping. A slithering and rattling sound starts entering your dam of being famous, and out of nowhere you wake up. You need to go to the bathroom so you start to get up, but you step on something scaly. The next second there you are holding your leg from the pain coursing through it. Once you manage to come yourself down you peer at your calf to see blood running down it, in two streams like parallel rivers. Quickly, you manage to bandage it up and go back to bed, where insomnia hits you like a train and the softness of your favorite blanket is nonexistent, so to the doctor you go. When you tell the receptionist what happened, she sends you straight to the E.R. to get a life or death treatment of antivenom! The doctor said according to your symptoms and the fact of what you heard, you must have been bit by a rattlesnake! After you are given the antivenom you go home and search up more information. You find out that a rattlesnakes’ venom is a type called biogenic amines that affects your transmission of nerve impulses and other signaling between cells. You also learned that cottonmouths, copperheads, and tree vipers also have this type of venom.

This is already a decent amount of information for the average person to know about snake venoms, but for a herpetologist or an ametuer herpetologist this is just the tip of the fang. Venoms are not just a random cocktail of death, there is actually a deep and complicated science behind them. Instead of being one thing, venoms are a mixture of twenty to one-hundred toxins each with its own individual trait.

Sadly there are still fatalities even with these antivenoms around the world, that add up one-hundred thousand deaths each year worldwide. Yet only six people each year die from snake bites in the U.S., but do not be afraid because your own fear might just scare away all the possibilities to learn something new.