Me with a stonefish in Townsville, Queensland.
INTRODUCTION
My name is Dr. Bryan Grieg Fry and I consider myself to be one
of the luckiest people alive. I get to travel the globe catching
snakes! Ever since I was a small child,
all I have ever wanted to do is play with venomous animals for
a living. Its quite a satisfying feeling to have this childhood
obsession come true. It makes my mum feel a bit better about the
myriad of strange, unusual and often dangerous animals that took
up residence in our household during my years at home!
I head up a venom research group in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the University of Melbourne and use my work in the field to continue a unique blend of science that focuses on advancing evolutionary theory through venomous animal wrangling skills., innovative science and unique specimens. We operate as a team of mutual adventurers driven by our curiousity for the natural world and how it all comes together.
As a venom researcher/global snake botherer, I have the incredible luck of having a career of searching out the rarest snakes in the world and determining what makes their venom tick. This has some very pleasant side effects. For example, I once had a pair of Feae's vipers (Azemiops feae) sharing the coolness of my bedroom. My justification for this was that the vipers needed an air-conditioned room and daily water changes. A pretty tenuous excuse but when talking about one of the holy grails of venomous reptile keeping, any excuse is a good excuse!
KING COBRA ENCOUNTERS
The largest animal I work with is the king cobra (Ophiophagus
hannah). These 18-foot denizens of the dark forest interior
are by far the most intelligent snakes I have ever worked with.
To get one out for milking I have to enter a very large, room-sized
cage that houses three males and a female. Invariably, they end
up splitting up, so that I have king cobras literally coming at
me from all sides. This makes for some rather fun moments - errr
- I mean tense situations.
One thing that really helps is to use their own behavioral stimuli
against them. For instance, to establish dominance over each other,
king cobras rear up and try to touch each other on the top of
their heads. When one succeeds, the other drops down submissively
and crawls away. In the wild, this is an effective way of determining
the largest and healthiest, and thus who gets territorial and
breeding rights in an area.
Therefore, when I'm in the king cobra enclosure, if one gets too close I gently tap it on top of its head in order to get it to back off. To get a king cobra out of the cage in order to milk it, I drop a Midwest Pro Bagger over its head. The cobra will crawl into the bag and contently curl up. Even the massive and extremely aggressive 15-foot alpha-male is managed quite easily this way. This minimizes stress on the snakes. Ironically, despite being the longest and one of the most infamous of all venomous snakes, king cobras are actually quite delicate. Stress-related illness is the number one killer of king cobras in captivity, so anything I can do to minimize this, I will. Once a snake is in the bag, getting it out means reaching in and grasping the head. This is easier said than done, of course.
Only once did the bag system fail. There is a chute at the bottom of the Pro-Bagger that allows the snake to crawl into a tube. One time, we were filming the big kings for a documentary. I had just engaged in a long and sweaty chase inside the cage while trying to get the big male out to remove an eye cap. I had the cobra all snug in the bag before leaning back in the sunshine with my eyes closed to take a short break.
I opened my eyes to see a very
upset king cobra gazing at me from about two feet away! The knot
on the chute had come loose and the snake had pushed its way through
in an effort to escape. Luckily, the big male was much too big
and he got stuck half way out of the bag. We spent the next 10
minutes delicately cutting the bag off the cobra. Film crews,
of course, love it when things go wrong.
AN EARLY BITE
A "well, I screwed up, but look what I discovered" situation
happened early on during my PhD. studies. My thesis was to be
on novel molecules from Australian elapids. A pretty generalized
brief and one that gave me full license to play with whatever
took my fancy. It was an intellectual fishing expedition of sorts.
I targeted the rarer of the Australian elapids and set out to
collect them.
The first Stephen's banded snake (Hoplocephalus stephensi)
that I collected promptly bit me the first time I attempted to
milk it. I looked up the clinical effects but not much was known
as there were no well-documented cases of such a snakebite. As
far as anyone knew, Stephen's banded snakes were not considered
dangerous. I clearly discounted this as my body hit the ground
seconds after the bite. I regained consciousness quickly, got
a pressure bandage on and took off for the hospital.
Upon arrival 15 minutes after the bite, my blood was completely unable to clot, my blood pressure was 87/36 and my heart rate was 42. Despite this, I was completely conscious. Twelve hours after the bite, my blood pressure and heart rate were unchanged and my blood still wouldn't clot. This was despite the administration of many vials of tiger snake antivenom (the closest match because there was not and still is not a specific antivenom for Hoplocephalus envenomations). This had all of us quite worried. Eighteen hours after the bite, however, the symptoms finally began to reverse.
While many Australian elapids have devastating effects upon the blood chemistry, rapid and sustained hypotension has not been attributed to any of the species. I ended up focusing upon this for my PhD. It turns out that the snakes have packed their venom with a blood pressure regulating hormone that is almost identical to one that is used in the human body. This was a remarkable find that came about, like all great scientific discoveries, by pure chance.
ADDLED ADDER OWNER
Another of my favorite "Something went wrong but wow did
it work out well!" stories occurred while filming a documentary
called Menacing Waters for the Discovery Channel. We were filming
sea snakes in Far North Queensland, Australia, when we were totally
blown out by a cyclone that passed directly overhead. The carnage
the next day was phenomenal. Trees across roads, live electrical
wires writhing about like a mamba on crack and flooding everywhere.
The local pub remained open for business, though. Not even a direct
hit from a cyclone could interfere with the Australian male's
drinking habits! The pub owner was a very practical business man
who had the most expensive private back-up power generator in
the entire town.
With the water quality toast for weeks, we drove north up to the Atherton Tablelands to get some stock footage of land snakes. As we pulled up to the residence of the local reptile keeper, whose snakes we were renting for the day, the cameraman grandly announced that he always has the camera rolling so he doesn't miss those one-chance-in-a-million shots.
We strolled into the house and began admiring cage after cage of snakes. The owner was particularly proud of his albino common death adders (Acanthophis antarticus). I was happily reminiscing about my PhD studies while admiring some captive-bred Stephen's banded snakes while he was off showing the death adders. Suddenly I heard someone yell, "Ow! I've been bit!" and looked over to see the owner looking at his hand in stunned disbelief. The cameraman, of course, despite his grand statement, hadn't even unpacked his gear!
The snake owner had reached into one side of the adder cage with a snake hook (which had a divider down the middle to separate the snakes). Unbeknownst to him, one of the adders had squirmed past the divider and was hiding under the newspapers in the bottom of the cage. It actually struck through the newspapers and got him perfectly. The two holes in the newspaper matched the two in his finger.
I quickly wrapped a pressure-immobilization bandage around the bite on his arm and packed him into the car. During our rapid drive to the local hospital, I removed injectable adrenalin and injectable antihistamine from the first aid kit in the event of an allergic reaction to the venom. (These items should be in every venomous reptile keeper's first aid kit in case of immediate allergic reactions to venomous bites.)
The footage we got in the emergency room was priceless. The staff was straight out of Central Casting. The doctor was a beautiful Welsh locum with long, tangled hair and a more-than-impressive figure. This fact was lost on the patient, who was in the throes of severe neurotoxicity and a bit beyond appreciating anything or anybody at that point. Upon the administration of antivenom, the patient had an allergic reaction to it and his body then turned into one gigantic hive. Luckily, this new development was managed quite readily through adrenalin and antihistamines.
The decision was made to transfer the patient to a larger hospital and the Royal Flying Doctor Service was contacted to fly him out. There was one minor complication: Another cyclone was about to come on shore and it was making a direct path for us! To make matters worse, the predicted arrival of the helicopter coincided with the predicted arrival of the cyclone. Eventually, though, we got him out and all went well. And at the end of the day there was some awesome footage to boot!
GETTING TO KNOW THE LOCALS
The best field work experience I ever had was while filming an
upcoming National Geographic special about the work I've been
doing on the katuali (Laticauda schystorhyncha). This unique
sea krait is found only in the waters of the Pacific Island nation
of Niue (pronounced "new-way"). To find Niue on the
map, draw a line due east from Tonga and a line south from Samoa.
Approximately where they cross is Niue. At only 104 square miles,
it looks like a dot on even the most detailed map.
To view Niue from the air is breathtaking. It is the sort of island paradise that I didn't think existed anymore. The towering waves slamming down against the rocky shore created a mist over the island and gave it a decided Jurassic Park look. Our goal was to research and film the habitats of the sea kraits and record what they did as they went about their daily business. The visibility underwater at Niue is mind boggling, and the first dive absolutely blew my mind.
Snakes were captured either during deep dives (up to 165 feet
down) or during exploration of submerged shoreline caves with
entrances at a depth of 45 feet. The caves were really tough to
work in, due to the strong surge action of the waves. The key
is to keep from getting pummeled against a cave wall while not
letting go of the snake that is currently being wrestled into
the bag. The first day's score was Bryan: 12 - Cave Walls: 3.
As a general rule, when diving with sea snakes, I wear a thick wetsuit that covers me from head to foot to protect against that stray fang. Contrary to popular belief, some species of sea snake have fairly long fangs (up to 9 millimeters) and deliver large quantities of venom (up to 150 milligrams). Gloves are always a good idea if you're the one doing the poking and prodding. The sea kraits are venomous, but are fairly mild tempered and not usually inclined to bite. With this in mind, my dive buddy/local guide was quite unimpressed by my head-to-toe suit and teased me, saying that the kraits would never bite a local. So into the water we went to tango with our mild-mannered friends.
Moments into the dive, a large, aggressive sea krait latched its fangs into my guide's dive mask. Violent thrashing ensued. Luckily, the snake's fangs stuck in the rubber and not in the guy's head. After a bite to the head from a venomous animal, there is not much first aid you can do for the person except hope that there is medical care very nearby! The resulting film footage was hilarious, though, as he spat out his regulator, creating a cloud of bubbles that instantly enveloped both him and his "local-loving" scaly mate.
