Deadly Snakes That Take Life Easy
Reading edition
Deadliest of serpents are the Pacific sea snakes. A bite almost certainly would be fatal to a human being. Yet native children of the Palau Islands in the South Pacific play with these reptiles with complete impunity. They pick them up and toss them from one to another just as American children play “catch.” Natives of the Palaus look upon the reptiles with complete indifference.
The term “sea snake” is somewhat of a misnomer. Actually the creatures spend most of their days asleep among rocks on beaches. They are excellent tree climbers and like to sun themselves in crotches of branches. At dusk, however, they move out to the reefs where presumably they spend most of the night pursuing small fishes, their principal food. They are excellent swimmers and their bodies have been somewhat modified, with flattened, paddle-like tails, for sea life.
Fortunately, on land at least, they are sluggish and non-aggressive. They hardly can be induced to bite and will suffer almost any indignity without retaliating. About the only way a person would be likely to be bitten would be by stepping directly on the head of one of these snakes with bare feet. This is an unlikely event, for the sea snakes do not spend any time under shallow water where they would be a peril for bathers.
Some are quite beautiful, about five feet long and banded with black and white. Their capture is easy. It is simply a matter of pinning down the head with a stick and picking up the snake by the neck.
Throughout the entire sea snake area in the Pacific there are only five or six instances reported where the serpents have bitten humans. In every case the victim has died; there is no anti-venom against the sea snake toxin.
Some years ago Dr. Herbert Clark, former director of the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory, dove off a boat in Balboa harbor and swam ashore, a distance of about 200 yards. As he neared the shore there were alarmed cries from the deck he had left. Dr. Clark looked around. He found he had unwittingly swum through a school of several thousand black and white serpents, each about two feet long. None had touched him.