Snake Island is located off the coast of Brazil, and from above it looks stunningly beautiful.
Unfortunately, it's also home to one of the deadliest snake species in the world and,
oh yeah, there are literally thousands of them.
"Snakes.
Why did it have to be snakes?"
The deadly snake that calls Snake Island its home is probably not something you've ever
heard of, and that's because this little speck of land off the coast of Brazil is the only
place you can actually find it.
It's called the golden lancehead, and the name is quite descriptive — the snake is
a lovely golden color and its head is shaped like a weapon of war, except if you get stuck
by a regular lance, you actually have a chance of survival.
Now, the golden lancehead is not the only member of the lancehead genus.
According to Atlas Obscura, lanceheads are common in Brazil and are responsible for around
90% of all snakebite fatalities in that country.
If you're bitten by a lancehead in mainland Brazil and you don't receive medical treatment
you've got about a 7 percent chance of dying.
If you do receive medical treatment, you still have a 3 percent chance of dying, and your
symptoms might include kidney failure, brain hemorrhage, intestinal bleeding, necrosis
of muscular tissue — you know, standard stuff.
That's mainland lanceheads, though.
The venom of the golden lancehead is thought to be as much as five times more potent than
its wimpy mainland cousins, so yeah.
There's a great reason why Snake Island is off limits to the average tourist.
Believe it or not, golden lanceheads are not the sole slithery occupant of Snake Island.
Of course they aren't.
Snake Island is home to another snake species, called Sauvage's nail-eater.
Luckily for Snake Island's snail population, a 2005 study concluded that the island's population
of Sauvage's snail-eaters were basically the same species as those found on the mainland,
so unlike the golden lanceheads, there was no freakishly terrifying evolutionary trajectory
blessing them with snail-killing laser beams coming out of their eyes or anything.
And Sauvage's snail-eaters are non-venomous, and therefore mostly harmless to anything
that isn't a snail.
Okay, so, Snake Island has deadly snakes and that's horrifying, and it has non-deadly snakes
that are still sort of horrifying, but at least it doesn't also have giant cockroaches
and terrifying locusts or anything.
Except for the fact that Snake Island totally has giant cockroaches and terrifying locusts.
Yes, that's right.
According to Business Insider, anyone who's feeling brave enough to camp on the island
better make sure to clean up after themselves or else they will be, quote, "knee-deep in
cockroaches by morning."
And once you've got that tent up you'd should probably plan to sleep on a cot, because if
you make your bed on the ground you'll be able to feel the roaches swarming around under
you when you lie down.
The Vice team who visited the island reported:
"There are blue locusts and so many of these weird, prehistoric-looking cockroaches on
the ground at night that it crunches when you walk.
Place is f----d.
No one is allowed there for a reason.
Don't ever go."
As terrifying as all this sounds, we don't really know the exact number of golden lanceheads
on Snake Island.
Smithsonian says it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 to 4,000.
From there, the media loves to extrapolate on just what that means from a snakes-per-square
foot perspective, which is kind of a harder number to pin down.
Some researchers have guessed that the island has a snake density of one to five snakes
for every 3 square feet of surface area, which is plenty.
They also chill up in the trees, so you might not even see them if you're only looking on
the ground.
"So even though we don't see snakes right now, you're saying there are snakes here?”
“Ohhh yeah.
They are everywhere, but you have to find them."
On the other hand, Business Insider says visitors to Snake Island can expect to see one snake
every 10 or 15 minutes, at least until they actually travel inland.
Closer to the center of the island, the snake density is more like one snake every 54 square
feet, which is kind of a long way from those other scary estimates.
Not that you'll stay alive long enough to reach the center of the island.
You're probably wondering, "How bad can it be?"
Because the bite from, say, a black mamba shuts down the nervous system and paralyzes
its victims eventually leading to death in 100% of cases, unless the victim is really
darn close to a vial of antivenom.
So really, it couldn't possibly get any worse than that.
Except that black mamba venom doesn't liquify your insides, so there's that.
According to Vice, "liquifying your insides" may be an exaggeration but it's likely that
no one will ever really know for sure because although there have been surprisingly few
deaths from golden lanceheads, no one has actually ever lived long enough to make it
to a hospital.
So it's not like doctors can put patient notes into a database or anything.
“If one of these were to bite us, we'd have six hours to get off the island and to a hospital."
"Well...up to."
"Up to."
The Brazilian mainland is about eight hours away by sea, so you'd probably have time to
die a couple times before you could get anywhere near civilization.
As molecular biologist Bryan Fry said on an episode of 60 Minutes:
"With these snakes it will be a particularly painful death.
You're going to die screaming."
The crazy thing about natural substances that can make people die screaming is that they
often have medicinal properties.
Puffer fish toxin, for example, could one day be turned into a pain-relieving drug for
cancer patients.
Golden lancehead venom is showing some promise, too — it's already been used to make blood
pressure medication, and Smithsonian says it might also have applications in treating
heart disease, blood clots, and circulation problems.
That doesn't mean if you have high blood pressure you should go to Snake Island and let a golden
lancehead bite you, because medicines that are derived from powerful toxins need to be
extracted and refined in a lab.
But it also means that it's probably not a good idea to just go and drop a bomb on the
island, either, no matter how tempting that might be to most sane people.
According to local legend, the golden lancehead was first introduced to Snake Island by pirates,
who put them there to act as a sort of legless, venomous watch dogs.
When you think about it though, that seems really counterproductive.
Pirates are cool and everything, but it doesn't seem super likely that they trained venomous
snakes to only bite treasure-stealing scallywags and not, you know, pirates.
As fun as that particular legend is, pirates probably didn't have anything to do with the
snakes on Snake Island.
According to the Smithsonian, the golden lancehead has been around since well before the golden
age of piracy.
So yeah, Snake Island's pirate/snake link is tenuous, but a tenuous relationship with
the facts has never really bothered the Discovery Channel.
In fact they somehow managed to get permission from the Brazilian government to bring a whole
bunch of treasure hunters to Snake Island, where they proceeded to find nothing except
a bunch of snakes.
The series, Treasure Quest: Snake Island, appears to have only been shot on the actual
Snake Island for one season — after that the treasure-questers branched out into the
jungles of Paraguay, which are blissfully free of golden lanceheads.
We're sure it was absolutely 100 percent because their "clues" pointed away from the island,
and that it had nothing to do with thousands of deadly snakes or with the Brazilian government
just not really wanting them stomping around on Snake Island for another couple seasons.
The golden lancehead was probably always dangerous, but the trajectory that led to them being
a special kind of dangerous started roughly 11,000 years ago when sea level rise separated
Snake Island from the mainland.
Once they found themselves isolated, the golden lancehead's ancestors kind of had the perfect
evolutionary conditions for becoming one of the most venomous snakes in the world.
According to the Smithsonian, they had no ground predators, which means there weren't
any animals picking them off, therefore interfering with their efforts to produce ever-increasingly
venomous babies.
There was also no prey on the ground, so to find food the golden lancehead's ancestors
had to go up into the trees and kill migratory birds.
But killing birds with venom is problematic because a bird will fly away as soon as it's
bitten, so even if it dies a few minutes later, it could have flown a long way away from the
snake that bit it.
That kind of defeats the purpose of actually using the venom in the first place.
So the golden lancehead had to develop especially toxic venom — something that would incapacitate
its victim almost immediately.
By the time those birds hear hissing, it's already too late.
"Hissssssss.”
And thousands of years later, visitors to Snake Island can see the results of that evolutionary
process up close and in person.
That is, if they don't instantly die because they were bitten by a golden lancehead.
Isn't evolution a wondrous thing?
So the thing about being a super-ultra-deadly snake on an isolated island in the Atlantic
Ocean with potentially life-saving properties in your venom is that is that you are likely
to become a valuable commodity.
According to the Smithsonian, wildlife smugglers — sometimes called "biopirates" — sneak
onto the island so they can catch golden lanceheads and sell them on the black market.
Evidently, there's demand for illegally procured golden lanceheads, both for venom and for
the distinction of owning a super deadly pet.
"People keep these as pets.”
“Oh yeah, yeah."
Before you scoff at the stupidity of anyone who would go to Snake Island illegally so
they can steal live specimens of one of the world's most deadly snakes, well, consider
this: The black market value of a single golden lancehead is between $10,000 and $30,000.
Still probably not worth your insides melting or anything, but at least you can sort of
grasp why certain desperate individuals might want to take the chance.
There's still a lighthouse on Snake Island, but at some point in the 1920s the Brazilian
government got wise and decided that it maybe wasn't such an awesome idea to have it staffed
365 days a year.
Since that decision was made, it's been automated, but "automated" does not necessarily mean
"maintenance-free," which means the Brazilian government still has to send someone to the
island every year to perform routine maintenance on the lighthouse.
Just imagine being the person who pulls the short straw for that assignment.
According to Vice, the Brazilian Navy gets dibs on inspecting and maintaining the Snake
Island lighthouse, and we very much hope that the workers who commit to the trip each year
get some serious danger pay because the lighthouse isn't exactly snake-proof.
In fact, one of the earliest accounts of a death on the island involved the lighthouse
keeper and his family.
So now that you know golden lanceheads can melt your insides and take out entire families,
we'd like you to take a moment to feel concerned about their welfare.
Yes, the golden lancehead is an endangered species.
In fact, according to the Smithsonian, in the last 15 years or so, the golden lancehead
has suffered a population decline of about 50%, partly because of biopirates and partly
because of disease and habitat degradation.
Evidently, the Brazilian government has removed some of the vegetation, perhaps so people
won't die while trudging through it.
Anyway, this has all contributed to the golden lancehead's status as "critically endangered."
And maybe it's hard for some people to think compassionately about a creature that is capable
of delivering "screaming death," but it's also important to recognize that the golden
lancehead is totally unique, evolved to cope with the complicated hand it was dealt, and
also might have human-life-saving compounds in its venom.
Compassion might not be a golden lancehead thing, but it's definitely a human thing.
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