A Fang-tastic Journey: Pursuing the Venomous Snakes of Papua New Guinea
BY MARK O'SHEA
Papua New Guinea has one of the highest death rates from snakebite in the world, suffering over 200 deaths a year from a population of 5.5 million. By comparison, Australia,with a population of 20 million and many closely related venomous snakes, has an annual snakebite mortality of two to four. Clearly, PNG has snakebite problem, and the Australian Venom Research Unit (AVRU) is trying to sort it out.
In September 2006, I returned to Papua New Guinea for two months of fieldwork with the AVRU, which involved capturing venomous snakes from over PNG to provide venom for toxinology studies (and possibly to produce a Papua-specific series of antivenins) and DNA to establish species identifications and improve understanding of the relationships and biogeography of New Guinea elapids. To this end, AVRU has established a unit for holding and maintaining venomous snakes in Port Moresby.
On the Trail of the Taipan
(Milne Bay Province)
We flew to Alotau, the provincial capital of Milne Bay Province, where AVRU researcher David Williams, his assistant Jasper, and I began our search on the Padi Padi oil palm plantation, part of the giant Milne Bay Estates. We were after Papuan taipans, but found a host of other interesting reptiles to photograph: blue-tongued skinks, ground boas, three species of pythons, and tree snakes.
We managed to track down a local plantation worker named Timothy, who had a reputation for finding snakes. David and I are extremely wary of asking other people to take risks catching venomous snakes, especially in a PNG society that is governed by compensation and “payback.” So we made it clear that we were hiring Timothy as a guide and not a snake-catcher.
Driving back toward the plantation offices the next day, we sighted smoke from a grass fire, lit by hunters to flush out bandicoots and wallabies. We found two dead taipans on the road, both with spear wounds. The snakes must have fled the fire in the grassland and been killed crossing the road. David, Jasper, Timothy, and I spaced ourselves along the tracks bordering the burning grass block and waited.
Within moments, a black snake, sleek and fluid as oil, slid out onto the road 300 feet away: an adult taipan. As I neared the taipan it stopped, head up, alert, and started to retreat back the way it had come. I lunged for it with my snake tongs but failed to get a grip near the head.With three feet of angry snake lunging back at me, I had to release the tongs to try again, nearer the head. The taipan was faster, did a figure 8 around my feet, and delivered a parting bite to my boot as it disappeared back into the grass.
I was breathless and annoyed at missing my first big Milne Bay taipan, but what I did not know was that the taipan was waiting to attempt another crossing. No sooner had I turned my back and started to walk back down the track than he took his chance. “Snek, snek, taipan snek!” the hunters chorused, and I turned to see my five-foot adversary make his second run. I was much closer this time and did not miss with the tongs, a firm capture about 18 inches back from the head. Off my belt came the folded Probagger system (a snake-bagging system based on a fly fisherman’s one-handed landing net). One flick and the black bag was open and rigid, and ten seconds later the taipan was in the bottom of it. I was shaking with vindicated relief and excitement when I got on the radio to David.
“Yu laikim wanpela taipan e stap?” Do you want a live taipan? The next day we walked the plantation paths looking for alert snakes. Timothy and I came across and caught a huge taipan, almost seven feet, lying up on the frond-row. The next day we caught another one, then three the next day. By the end of six days of searching we had seen 42 live taipans and managed to capture ten, which was more than we had even expected to see. It might seem strange to find an open-country snake, like the taipan, in fairly closed-canopy plantation habitat, but these oil palm plantations were established on what had once been typical taipan habitat, savanna-woodland.
These are the most dangerous snakes in PNG, but they are not really aggressive. Padi Padi is a relatively small area, with very large populations of humans and highly venomous snakes, and snakebites are therefore relatively rare, albeit extremely serious, incidents. The snakes prefer not to come into contact with the workers and will usually attack only if they feel threatened. Taipans do not start fights, but they do finish them!
In the Shadow of Mt.
Lamington
(Oro Province)
I flew up to Popondetta alone and checked into my hotel, named for volcanic Mt. Lamington, which has brooded over the town since it last erupted and killed 3,000 in 1951. I contacted personnel from the Higaturu Oil Palm Estates, who offered to help in my search for venomous snakes with the loan of a pest control specialist named Gabby Chris.
I was driving back to my hotel one night between an old, swampy World War II airstrip and a small plantation, just outside Popondetta, when I saw a dark, three- to four-foot snake skim across the road in front of my vehicle. I just got a glimpse as it quickly disappeared into shadow to my right (in PNG you drive on the left side of the road), but it looked like a southern white-lipped python, a species for which I’d been collating scale counts and DNA samples for a German colleague. Thundering toward the snake from the other direction was a rural PMV (public motor vehicle) a truck loaded with people. I reached for my door handle, intending to leap from the car and snatch the poor python from certain death. At night in the tropics I always drive with seat belt off and door lock up, for rapid exits such as this, but on this occasion my door lock was down and I couldn’t get out fast enough.
As I fought to escape I shouted through the open window, “Snek emi stap, lukautim!” Snake here, take care! The PMV halted, and all flashlights went on so that as I fell from my vehicle, without my own flashlight or a snake stick, I could just see the serpent squirming into the welcoming shadow cast by the big PMV. I was about to grab it with my hand when something inside me warned, Don’t! As I pinned it gently with the rubber sole of my boot, the snake whipped around and laid into the back of my boot. But at the same time I grabbed its banded tail. Banded?! There are no banded pythons here!
The tail of the highly venomous New Guinea small-eyed snake is banded. How lucky I had been that my door lock had been down and my inner voice had warned me to take care. I recalled a story, told to me by David Williams, of a man bitten by a small-eyed snake who had shown up at the hospital outpatient’s department with the head and several inches of the snake stillattached to his foot, at which point the entire nursing staff fled and remained outside for an hour until someone came in and removed the tenacious but dead snake from the poor man’s foot. Small-eyed snakes do not go in for the rapid stab-and-release bite of the taipan or brown snake. They really enjoy their work and chew and chew and chew for maximum effect.
I was now precariously pinning a small-eyed snake(which was trying to kill my boot), a snake I badly needed to collect alive to save me a trip to the curiously named Mamba Estates near Kokoda, where it was reputedly common. But as my snake stick was in the car, I would need plenty of light to make the capture safely. I would ease my boot inward until I could grasp the snake behind the head with my hand and transfer it to a snake bag in the car. Looking up into the flashlights, I said, “Emi posin snek, mi laik kisim.” It’s a venomous snake; I want to catch him. Then something rather unfortunate happened. The frightened driver of the PMV drove off, taking all the flashlights with him and leaving me in total darkness, a dozen feet from my car, standing on a venomous snake with evil on its mind. I really did not want to lose this snake, but at any moment I expected to feel its eager mouth attach itself to the back of my bare leg.
To capture the snake, I knew I first needed light. So I raised my foot and flicked him swiftly toward the front of my vehicle, where the defective headlights looked invitingly bright for once. Sensing freedom, the snake did not stop but continued for the grass, where, just in time, I gently re-pinned him with my boot. There began a dance of death as I tried to secure his head while he tried to tag me on my lower leg. Eventually I grasped the snake safely with my left hand, whereupon he coiled around my right arm. Handcuffed, I wondered about the next stage, getting an extremely vengeful venomous snake into a snake-bag located on the backseat of a blacked-out 4x4.Where were all the enthusiastic, fascinated locals who invariably turn up within seconds when I jump from my car to capture a snake?
They were on their way, two of them—two very, very inebriated young men, staggering across the road toward me, but one held a flashlight. They probably had difficulty focusing on the dimdim (white man) standing in the road holding a deadly wait snek (white snake, the local name for the smalleyed snake) and even more difficulty believing what their eyes told them. However, like drunks around the world, they wanted to help, and on this occasion, it was gratefully received. I untangled my right arm and reached into the car for the Probagger, aided in my search by the flashlight-holder’s swaying beam. I opened the Probagger and gave it to the other man to hold, instructing the flashlight-holder to keep his beam on the snake as I lowered it into the mouth of the four-foot-deep bag. With a thrust, I dropped the snake into the bag and secured it safely. My two helpers staggered off into the darkness, a few kina richer, promising to come and help me again tomorrow. I drove back to the hotel, pondering the next problem. It was late, and this serpent would have to spend the night in my room. But how to get it there unnoticed?
I sneaked through reception and almost made it to my room when a security guard rounded the corner.
“Hey, masta . . .”
I froze.
“Hey masta, yu laik wanpela meri?”You want a woman?
“Nogat, tru.” No, thanks. I then added to myself, “I’ve had enough excitement for one night.”
My assistant, Gabby, was disappointed over missing the exciting small-eyed-snake capture, but he soon became very adept at finding snakes. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm was almost his undoing, which explains part of the reason why I strongly discourage non-specialists from catching snakes. One morning I picked up Gabby from our usual meeting point and noticed he was wearing a big grin and carrying a cloth bag.
“I’ve got you a keelback,” he said.
I had introduced him to these harmless little frog-eaters a couple of days earlier, and it seems he had found one walking back to his house the night before. I remonstrated with him for catching snakes without me and then opened the bag to find myself vindicated by the contents. Inside the bag was a small venomous snake: Müller’s crowned snake. It looks like a harmless keelback, but packs much more of a punch. Although nobody has died from its bite, victims have become quite ill. When I told Gabby what might have been, he was shocked and promised never to catch snakes without me around again. I was, however, privately pleased with the find and managed to obtain a second specimen myself the following day.
But what of the death adders and brown snakes I had actually come to Oro to find? I singularly failed to find a single death adder but succeeded beyond my wildest dreams with the brown snakes. We visited an oil palm mini-estate on the Buna road beyond the disused World War II Dobuduru airstrip and a wrecked B-24 Liberator. The plantation workers swore there were “Pap blacks” in the plantation, but the highly venomous Papuan black snake is confined to the southern provinces. The only other possibility was a brown snake. I hired five local lads to help us search as we walked through the palms, and within minutes we had a sighting: a small brown snake shot through the dappled shadows cast by the palms and disappeared into a frond-row. We ripped into the frond-row, but the little snake evaded capture. The next brown snake, a four-footer, was not so lucky and was captured and bagged before it could escape. I had just caught the first New Guinea brown snake taken by a scientist since the 1953 Archbold Expedition to Milne Bay, and the first for venom research!
Both these snakes had been moving quickly in the early afternoon, so I figured if we employed taipan tactics and arrived early in the morning as the snakes were beginning their basking, we should clean up. The following morning we searched for four hours without success and were just taking a short break when the only member of the team still searching shouted excitedly. Shaking ourselves awake, we all ran to where he was standing and saw a four-foot brown snake in the process of eating a 20-inch ground boa. Before I could capture the moment on camera, the brown snake regurgitated its still wriggling prey and bolted, too late because I am quicker with snake tongs than I am with a camera. Within three days we had seen six brown snakes, and I’d bagged three of them. The Oro phase had been remarkably successful, and I returned to Port Moresby with seven live venomous snakes.
The Island of the White
Snake (Madang Province)
When we arrived on the volcanic island of Karkar, we were told that (despite our requests to the contrary) villagers had been stockpiling venomous snakes for us. Mostly these were death adders caught and dropped into pits specially dug behind houses. Because of the fertile volcanic soil, there have been coconut and cocoa plantations on Karkar for generations, and the industry supports a large population of islanders and migrants from other parts of PNG. Karkar is also home to the smooth-scaled death adder and a very large population of New Guinea small-eyed snakes. The island has had an ongoing snakebite problem, and I have been visiting since 1990.
Plantation workers collect fallen coconuts, husk them on a sharp spike, and split the coconut for transportation to the driers for processing and export as copra. Our modus operandi for tracking down snakes consisted of finding a pile of discarded coconut husks at the right stage of decomposition—not too new, not too old—and systematically demolishing it in the hopes that a small-eyed snake had taken up residence. In the process we would turn up many other interesting creatures, from land crabs, scorpions, aggressive tarantula spiders, and giant centipedes to direct-breeding frogs, geckos, shiny skinks, ground boas, and other snakes. If we flushed a bandicoot, all the workers would pursue it, as they are a prized delicacy. My particular favorite husk pile inhabitant is the pukpuk palai, or crocodile skink, a remarkably dinosaurlike little lizard with facial war paint that is unique among skinks in its being able to vocalize. Its piercing little shriek of complaint was heard every time we uncovered one.
We searched a couple of dozen husk piles before we came to one containing a small-eyed snake, which I captured and bagged quickly. We had not reached the bottom of the husk pile, which is usually where these snakes retreat when they are being pursued, so I suggested pressing on and completing the pile. Under the final pieces of husk we caught a second specimen, the first time ever I have found two small-eyed snakes in the same husk pile.
The next day we left Karkar and returned to Port Moresby with four small-eyed snakes and 12 death adders for the snakebite project.
I have participated in many tropical field projects, from “biological reserve inventory surveys” to snakebite research, but this expedition to three provinces of PNG was one of the most successful. In the Port Moresby AVRU-UPNG venomous snake unit, some of the death adders have given birth, and one taipan and one small-eyed snake have laid eggs, which are hatching. DNA samples are being analyzed, and venom is being extracted and freeze-dried. David and I are planning a 2007 expedition to Western Province for Papuan black snakes, pigmy mulga snakes, and rough-scaled death adders. Hopefully an EC flag will make the trip with me.