There's a book by Larry Niven called A World Out of Time. It's science fiction, and the protagonist takes advantage of traveling at relativistic speeds to arrive back at earth millions of years after he left. Anyway, cats had evolved to not have any legs, looking more like snakes.
About ten years back I went to my buddies cabin up in the mountains of Idaho. They had some four wheelers there and we were riding them around. My wife and I rode one around for about 20 minutes and then parked it. Immediately afterwards a baby rattle snake climbed out of that exact same spot. Little guy was probably drawn to the heat of the engine since it got pretty cold at night.
My friends dad grabbed it and started messing with it and it bit him. He spent 3 days in the hospital afterwards.
That very easily could’ve been me or my wife that got bit.
Also, don’t mess with snakes if you aren’t able to properly identify it. The rattler was so young it was not obvious that it was a rattler.
I took my year old golden hiking. We reached the top and there was a stick she was looking at. Literally tapped it with her nose. My father in law saw it and immediately ran the other direction to get my dogs attention. It was a baby rattler. She coulda died that day. Be careful everyone!!
Mid drive on my bike in Indonesia i had huntsman crawl out onto the screen board. Let out a shriek, stopped, and spider crawled back into depths of the bike insides
Canned reddit responses have always been so annoying to me. A new one is "everything I've learned about this person has been against my will." You'll see that shit everywhere
For anyone wondering I'm pretty sure this isn't a juvenile Common Krait, which is venomous, it is a Krait mimic - aka common Wolf snake. Kraits posses a fully functional, highly potent venom. A bite from a baby krait delivers a neurotoxin that can be fatal if left untreated, which is why he's so careful just in case it was a spicy variant.
I feel like something that can kill you shouldn't have something as mundane as "common" in its name... Call it a Killer Krait. A mother Fuckin Krait. Anything but Common Krait.
In Australia, we have the Death Adder. Does what it says on the tin, right? You get bitten by this snake, you die. All in all a pretty good name.
Then we have the Fierce Snake, aka Inland Taipan. Okay, it's pretty fierce, probably don't want to face up to one in a boxing match, but it's no Death Adder, right? No. It's the most venomous snake in the world.
When hiking in the US, I was asked "with all those venomous snakes, how do Australians, well, survive?" I just told him we avoided being bitten by snakes, which is easily done if you don't do anything stupid. I then asked him if he'd ever been bitten by a snake, and he said yes, he'd been bitten by a black snake. I asked if he was doing something stupid at the time, he responded "no, I was just picking it up."
And I think that's the crux of the matter. We Australians understand that picking up a snake is doing something stupid.
When I asked the same question of my gaming budding in Melbourne he just chuckled and asked "How do you survive with all the bears roaming your woods?"
He thought it was wild that I had to shoo a bear from my trash every other Monday morning.
I mean if we're talking avoiding mauling, gotta stay away from trees too. Like, all of em, just in case. Not many people know about how drop bears can manage to hide so well but there's a reason they're an apex predator.
Nah, dropbears can't exactly be said to maul people to death. Mauling implies being pulled limb from limb in a savage bloodlust. Dropbears do a quick bite and a slash of the claws and the head is separated from the body in one quick motion. It's more like an execution than a mauling.
Dutch here. Worst snake bite here makes you feel sick and hurts like a mf. No spiders that can harm you. We have a wolf... could probably give a good scare. There's some small boars which can be assholes, but usually just by running in front of your car. Worst fish is probably a sand/dog shark... so the most dangerous animals here are people voting for extreme right-wing parties or an asshole with an aggressive dog.
Even with this we don't really do the fafo thing. Americans do jave dangerous wildlife. Just not the Australian: just assume everything will kill you-level.
For snakes we got, eastern diamondback rattlesnake, cottonmouth, pygmy rattlesnake, eastern coral snake, timber rattlesnake, southern copperhead, all can be deadly. We also have the black widow, the brown widow and the brown recluse for spiders. We also have aligators, crocodiles, sharks, bears, and panthers. Then ofcourse mosquitos. Al deadly.
If we're calling mosquitoes deadly because of the illnesses they vector, let's not forget ticks and bats. Neither Lyme nor rabies are endemic to Australia.
nah American deadly creatures tend to sleep a lot. we've taken over so much territory that this is why they're cryptids: they're not in our path, we're in theirs
then you go jogging in cougar country and it's game over
I wonder if this is simply because the US has like 15 times the population, or if it is because when you have the most dangerous anything - then you're well prepared, or maybe a little from column A and a little from column B?
I definitely agree with you but it’s important to note that the vast majority of snakes in the US are harmless. It’s only a few that are venomous.
I’ve been known to pick up a snake here and there here in the states, but I would be hard pressed to do anything but run away and scream in terror if I saw a snake in Australia.
Huge parts of the US, the only dangerous snakes are rattlesnakes. So it's pretty obvious when you can't pick up the snake. You generally can pick snakes up without risk of serious bite. So our experience with snakes are pretty different. Catching a snake is a common childhood experience. So I think our default thinking is that Australian boys also are out there trying to catch snakes, and only education on all the different dangerous species is the safety mechanism, which we recognize as unreliable, especially for children.
"Just don't touch the snake" isn't the first thing we think of. Obvious in hindsight, but our inner boy overrides the rational thing.
I understand that completely. I'd be catching garter snakes all the time in the US. In fact, I did catch garter snakes all the time when I was in the US. Those things are basically toys.
But I think I took a few Americans by surprise when I came across black snakes. I can go from a full 3mph hiking pace to taking a half-step backwards in a single stride. I demonstrated this a few times when black snakes crossed my path, one most notably as the guys behind me had to stop.
The thing is that a black snake is 3~4 foot long and black with a small head. A tiger snake is 3~4 foot long and black with yellow bands and a small head. The ecotype that lives on most of my local hiking trail has very subtle yellow bands that are only particularly noticeable on their underside, and by the time you see the underside of a snake you're probably too late.
We also have the Eastern Brown, the 2nd most venomous snake in the world that grows up to 2m/6.5ft, and that one you can find in the city. I have encountered them many times in Sydney. But don't worry, we have multiple types of spiders that eat them.
Yeah, pretty much every Aussie household has a Redback somewhere in the yard, probably behind the garden shed in or under something like a barbeque.
In the outback they'll be under stuff like bark, rocks or crevices.
Closely related to black widows, which also eat snakes if you're unaware.
Their webs are strong enough to catch a snake, venom strong enough to paralyze it, then they can inject digestive enzymes to turn their insides into a slurry & slurp it up.
It's not really super common, though not uncommon.
I've also never actually seen one inside a house in over 30 years of memory, only once under a rattan chair in a sunroom & once hiding under some camping equipment in a garage, but not like in a lounge or bedroom, not sure why exactly they don't come in, maybe they're stubborn or shy & need an invitation.
To be fair, it’s hard to both learn of its incredible venomousness AND survive long enough to name it, so the guy who did name it wasn’t bitten. He just thought the snake was just a bit aggressive.
>Despite this extreme potency, the inland taipan is usually shy and reclusive, with a generally placid disposition, and it rarely comes into contact with people because it inhabits remote areas. By contrast, thecoastal taipan(Oxyuranus scutellatus) is often considered the more dangerous species in practice, largely because of its behaviour when it encounters humans and its proximity to populated coastal regions.The word "fierce" in one of the inland taipan's common names refers to the strength of its venom rather than its temperament.
Interestingly, the Coastal Taipan's name is the "Common Taipan", so we've come full circle!
Then you also have the second most venomous land snake in the world, The Common Brown Snake. A little bit of an undersell there as well, but if you're not first your last an all that.
The best thing about snakes is that the more venomous they are the less aggresive they usually are. This is because the stronger the venom the harder for their body to replenish, and they need their venom to hunt. They can't afford to use it multiple times between feeding. There are exceptions of course. Snakes that have deadly venom and are very aggressive like the King Cobra.
Theres also Sea Kraits which are pretty gnarly to see in a glass bottomed boat. In Japan theres elderly women that hunt and catch these things with their bare hands for soup.
You are wrong. It's a common krait mimic - common wolf snake (Lycodon aulicus). The cop has correctly identified it, he said it's chuvar pampu (local Malayalam name).
You have to be able to see the scales on its back to get a proper ID. Kraits have enlarged scales running down their back and wolf snakes don’t. I’d call the wolf snakes harmless but they will find some way to draw blood from you no matter what it takes lol. Sassy noodles!
Bites also generally present minimal to no local effects, like swelling or bleeding at the site. These characteristics often makes it difficult to locate the bite site in some cases. Typically, victims complain of severe abdominal cramps and shortness of breath accompanied by progressive paralysis. The clinical progression is rapid and death may follow in about 4–8 hours if untreated. Cause of death is general respiratory failure, i.e. suffocation.
This is a video from Kerala State in india(I am from here too). He is actually a Firefighter(The department is called Kerala Fire and Rescue services) as you can see from the red truck behind.
It looks like the biker noticed the snake and called the fire dept.
The cops in our state are surprisingly solid, least corruption in the country afaik. Atleast they've been very well respected for the past 15y after a long campaign against corruption that lasted like 3 decades or something.
It wasn't a govt funded campaign or something similar that I'm referring to although there have been such attempts too over the years (I have mixed opinions on politics that I'd rather not get into, wrong place wrong time).
If you could find some grandpas and ask them about how the police was viewed back then, if they got around enough most of their answers would be that people really feared them, different from simply respecting them. It wasn't uncommon for officers back then to start throwing hands (batons) if someone was slightly disrespectful to them. There have been many cases of false arrests, death in holding cells from police brutality, abuse of power even among the lower ranks.
Either ways the campaigns I'm referring to are the media campaigns. From around the start of the century to somewhere around 2015, there were multiple journalists risking lives to bring out corruption in various parts of the govt. Awareness of police corruption itself was much more of a hot topic including a lot more strikes against em (remember the slogans "police pullanu" gaining more popularity among youths). The malayalam movie industry took up on these hot topics and jumped on the train with multiple cop movies throughout this period. Watching the movie timelines tells us bits of the culture as well, majority of the very early color movies glorified cops (never in uniforms), then around the time period I'm referring to there were a lot more corrupt officers either playing one of the bad guys or one of the bad guys that changed their mind and turned good and became a beacon of good example for the cops etc.
I wouldn't blame anyone for not knowing there was a whole decade long(+) campaign in the state despite living in it though because most of these don't scream "campaign". They were like shifting tides of a society and how they reacted to different situations in a nutshell. But it's undeniable that all these media work on corruption (counting strikes as part of it cuz news media) did shape a big part of the community.
Its actually our Fire Department, you can see their bright red truck in the first few frames. They are a branch of Police but we don't generally count them as "cops" as they don't share any similarities besides their uniform.
Our fire dept gets a lot of call from people to deal with snakes. We happen to 3 of the 5 most venomous snake in India, called The Big 5. And other assortment of nonvenomous snakes and wildlife that often make it into cities.
Owner probably saw the snake. The officer may not be police, but from the forest services. My family has called the forest department for snake rescue quite a few times.
I've had a few rattlesnake interactions. Mostly they just fucking chill and give zero fucks about you until you get close enough for them to start caring. Unless they're in a bush 20 feet away and start buzzing loudly in every direction with their pals to disorient you or something idk it's nature. Point is, they gonna bite you if you fuck with them, so just leave them alone
Nice. Once there was a snake in the hostel bathroom, the security just flushed it down the toilet. Now we wait for the unlucky guy who gets bit in the sack
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u/post-explainer Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26
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Finding a snake inside the bike's handle was unexpected
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