- [Coyote] Oh yeah, that is a big boy.
This is very powerful snake.
Whoa!
That right there is enough to kill five human beings.
A rattlesnake bite may need as many
as 25 vials of antivenom.
So how much does something like that cost you are asking?
Something big is gonna happen.
Whoa, immediate explosion of red blood cells.
I think it's fair to say that everybody loves
a good old fashioned East Coast versus West Coast battle.
Whether that's in sports, music, or in our case, reptiles.
And today we're going to compare the venom's
of the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake versus
the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake.
We're gonna see how they stand up against human blood,
my blood.
But to do that,
first we've gotta milk the snakes.
Now Carl, in your opinion,
which snake do you think is more potent,
Eastern or Western?
- Yeah, so that's a really tough question Coyote.
Conventional wisdom kind of says the Eastern Diamondback
is probably just a little bit more potent.
Western Diamondbacks, in very rare instances,
can have a neurotoxin, but that's unusual.
So they're both right there.
They're both the big game of north America
and certainly potentially lethal snakes.
- Okay, the most notorious venomous snakes
in the United States.
I know I'm ready, you guys are ready,
everybody out there watching is ready?
It's time to bring out the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake.
Oh yeah, that is a big boy.
Wow, beautiful coloration, my goodness.
(snake rattling)
That's that classic warning right there.
You better back up.
Don't get too close.
Oh, it's flighty all right.
- [Carl] Perfect, go ahead and go now.
All right, so Coyote work your way in here.
- Okay, wow. - You got him.
You got him. - It's a big snake.
- That's kind of an average,
four, four and a half foot Western Diamondback.
Of course, these guys will go over six feet
when they're full grown.
It's a beautiful,
this was really the classic rattlesnake
of the American West.
So they're beautiful snakes.
It's a pretty toxic venom and they still account
for a fair amount of snake bite in north America every year.
So we're going to let this guy bite.
They're typically pretty good producers.
(dramatic music)
- [Coyote] Whoa, strong snake.
- Lost one fang, so I don't know if you can see it,
but you only got a fang on the right side there.
And so rattlesnakes shed their fangs
and about every three or four months,
a rattlesnake or drop a fang and bring a brand new fang
into its place.
And sometimes there's a little gap in coverage
if you will there.
So you can see this venom on the top of the vile here.
So the duct is still putting out venom,
but there was no injection apparatus to get it
into the vial.
So we're gonna pipe pet that off of there
and move it back into the glass where it should be.
And a snake like this in a snake bite,
you'd only get one fang really,
so that would be to your benefit if that makes sense.
- Hmm, very interesting.
- All right, we'll go back in.
If you're good, I'm ready.
- I'm good, yeah.
- Here we go.
You can pull that lid back for me.
Good.
We're gonna put him back in the box.
Perfect.
Good.
So now you can pick up that fang,
and I don't know if you can see it,
but on the front end of that fang is the hole.
- Yes, I do see it.
I definitely see it. - So these guys have
a beautiful hollow hypodermic needle
that's perfectly adapted to injecting venom
into a warm blooded prey.
- Now, what would happen if I jabbed that into my hand?
Would that be enough to pierce and put some venom into me?
- Well it would certainly be quote unquote envenomation.
I don't think you would get enough venom
to cause any real trouble,
but you would certainly know you've stuck yourself
with something that has more than just a pointy end.
- I know what the audience is thinking right now,
do it Coyote,
let's see what happens if you get bit by a rattlesnake fang.
Not gonna happen, guys, sorry.
- [Carl] No, I wouldn't advise that either.
- So how do you feel about this yield of venom
and the amount that came out of that snake,
is that enough to kill a human if antivenom
was not received?
- Sure, you're certainly looking at it at least
a hundred milligrams of dry weight there.
- Can I hold this up?
- Yep, and we think that that's probably
at least one lethal dose of venom.
Western Diamondback venom is probably somewhere
in the neighborhood of that.
About a hundred milligrams is a lethal dose to an adult.
Now remember on an average bite for a snake that size,
you might typically see 350 milligrams, 400 milligrams.
So this was a low yield,
partially because of that tooth being shutout.
But it's certainly enough to really cause problems.
I mean, that much Western Diamondback venom
is a hospital antivenom event for sure.
- Mm-hmm, wow that is,
that is impressive right there.
All right, well now that we've seen the power
and the venom of the Western Diamondback,
it's time to go East Coast.
- It's time to go East Coast.
Time to bring out the Eastern Diamondback.
- My personal, one of my favorites.
- And we'll see whether or not the Eastern Diamondback
gives us a larger yield of venom.
And then we'll kind of talk about how
those two snakes match up.
- Sounds great Coyote, sounds good.
There she goes, okay.
- This might be a very big snake.
- [Carl] And just close that.
All right, here I come.
And then Mara come on up.
- Oh wow that is a huge snake.
Holy mackerel.
(snake rattling)
That's bigger than the Eastern Diamondback
we milked last time.
(snake rattling)
- She's a good size snake.
She's a little bit agitated.
- [Coyote] Yep, I can see that.
- We're gonna try to kind of work her back to the table.
Eastern Diamondbacks, right,
are the largest rattlesnakes in North America,
just by a little.
They get over seven feet in length.
This snake is just shy of five feet.
She's a young female and you can get a sense of how big
the head is on that rattlesnake and what she's capable of.
So we're gonna watch her bite and the Eastern Diamondback
is absolutely one of our favorites.
A snake we handle lots of here at Medtoxin.
And of course this venom is used in the anti-venom project
in North America.
So it's an important venom to produce in fair quantities.
So I'm gonna shift her back a little bit.
She might do it for me.
Mara's gonna give her a press.
- [Coyote] Ooh,
that's a delicate little balance right there.
- [Carl] Ooh, perfect.
Don't change anything.
- [Mara] Perfect, she's right there.
- Good, perfect.
- [Coyote] Got her, whoa.
This is very powerful snake.
- And you guys tell me when you're good.
- [Man] We're on good.
- [Carl] Good?
- [Coyote] Whoa!
- And that's a little more significant yield,
a little more in line with what's proper
for a rattlesnake of that size.
So that's about 500 milligrams and in one shot out.
And of course,
if you think about a hundred milligrams is lethal.
so you're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood
of five lethal doses of venom in one bite.
And it gives you a sense Coyote of how potentially dangerous
the Eastern Diamond Rattlesnake is.
A snake bite from a big rattlesnake is no joke.
I mean, this is an event where you're talking dozens
of vials of anti-venom to counteract that snake's venom.
- Carl said dozens of vials of antivenom.
If you were bitten by large rattlesnake
with a significant yield of venom.
So how much is something like that cost you were asking?
Venom can be difficult to value,
but a single vial of pit viper antivenom in North America
is typically around $15,000.
And on average,
a rattlesnake bite may need as many as 25 vials.
Keep in mind this doesn't factor in the hospital costs,
which often includes emergency room treatment
and several weeks spent in recovery.
So when you do the math,
your misfortune equates to more than $375,000.
Absolutely massive.
Look at this, the snakes girth is bigger around
than my arm is.
- [Carl] It's beautiful.
It's just an amazing snake.
Look at the beautiful pattern, those diamonds.
I mean, this snake is so incredible.
- So we'll put this guy back and then we'll talk
a little bit about Western versus Eastern.
- Okay, sounds good.
- Great job, thanks.
- Yep.
- Got her. - Thank you.
You got her okay?
- Yes sir, thank you.
- That Eastern was a little bit bigger
and that right there is enough to kill what Carl said,
easily five human beings.
One bite, five people.
That is impressive.
Okay Carl so when I look at that yield of venom,
as compared to the Western Diamondback,
clearly we got more out of the Eastern Diamondback.
So in that East Coast versus West Coast battle,
I'm probably gonna throw it to the East Coast
as being a more dangerous snake bite when it comes
to venom yield.
But again,
that might have to do with the snake on a particular day
and the snake size, right?
- No question.
And I think what we're really seeing here is,
don't forget snake's meter their venom.
They decide how much they're gonna inject.
What you're seeing there in terms of quantity
is not really capability, but decision-making.
You don't want to interact with a venomous snake.
They don't want anything to do with you.
They wanna be left alone.
And even though venom's primary purpose in snakes
is obtaining food,
you can see that a defensive bite,
which is what you're seeing here,
still can be a really significant envenomation.
- So both of these snakes,
the Eastern Diamondback and the Western Diamondback,
a bite from that snake is considered a medical emergency.
It can take your life if you do not receive antivenom.
Now when it comes to the potency of the venom,
the only real way to determine what this venom is doing
to human blood cells is to actually mix that venom
into blood, my blood.
And to do that,
we're gonna move to the next step of the experiment,
where we're going to draw blood from me
and then look at it underneath a microscope.
To start,
we perform a rudimentary test with three Petri dishes
of my blood.
The control has no venom while the other two are each given
a small sample of the respective venoms,
clearly labeled Eastern Diamondback
and Western Diamondback.
After sitting for several minutes,
we visually notice slight coagulation near the
the drops of venom,
but a much lower blood viscosity near the outer edges
of the dish.
To really see the cellular destruction
your body would facing if you were tagged by a rattlesnake,
we need to turn to the microscope.
So what we're gonna do now is get a small amount of venom
into the pipette.
Hunter, I'll let you do the honors
and how much are we going to pull out?
- We're gonna do two microliters, very small drop.
- [Coyote] That's like just the prick of the edge
of a thing pretty much.
Something big is gonna happen.
Snake venom going whoa, holy mackerel!
Immediate explosion of red blood cells.
Wow, that just completely engulfed the screen.
I didn't see that coming.
- That was quick.
- So the venom is actually drawing the blood out from
underneath the cover slip into its drop.
Interesting to know it's not moving very quickly,
little bit of a different reaction than we were expecting.
Let's see, we'll go up to a hundred magnification.
- So are those a bunch of dead red blood cells right there?
Right at the edge line.
- There's a few out floating in the venom,
but that's actually in the venom and the cells
are still pretty whole.
Just a little different than we thought we'd see.
- Hmm, really interesting reaction that we got
under the microscope from the Eastern Diamondback venom,
almost like there's an anticoagulant at work.
Not as much destruction of the red blood cells
as I think we originally anticipated.
When the venom hit the edge of the slide,
there is an immediate explosion of blood cells
and then it just kind of stopped.
But when you look at the slide itself,
if you look here, I'll hold this up,
you can see where the venom pulled all the blood out
and into it.
And it just coagulated it there in a clump.
Very interesting visually.
Now we need to take a look at the Western Diamondback.
Ooh, that's a big soak, whoa!.
Look at that!
Instantaneous destruction it looked like.
Whoa, that was like an atomic bomb dropping
and just wiping out the cells along the edge line.
- And you can see too, on the actual slide,
you can see how it's just broken up those blood cells.
- Yes, that was catastrophic the way that that hit.
Very different from the Eastern Diamondback.
- Yeah, it's kind of giving these kinds of lines too.
So it's not just an extreme explosion,
but it's definitely causing a lot of cell death here.
You can see it under the a hundred times magnification
and with the naked eye.
- So these black dots that we're seeing here,
like the Eastern Diamondback, is that dead cell material?
- It could be dead cells or it could be collated cells,
it's hard to say.
It looks like the blood cells are grouping together.
- So maybe some pro coagulant components
to this venom as well.
- [Hunter] And you can tell they've really lost
a lot of their morphology, right?
They're not, they're not near as nice,
round donut shapes anymore.
They're kind of more spread out.
Certainly this chain here of cells
is really unhealthy and abnormal,
so these are cells which are dead and going
to explode essentially.
- All right Hunter,
well at this point,
I would say that we have learned a lot.
From the rudimentary experiment to what we saw
underneath the microscope,
without question rattlesnake venom is extremely destructive
to the blood cells.
Now is this what you expected to see today?
- Man, just so cool to see it really.
I had no idea how it would look.
- Well we learned a lot.
And what this does tell us is that both of these snakes,
the two dominant rattlesnake species in the United States
are incredibly potent.
So bite would be considered a medical emergency.
But the good news is that if you are bitten,
there's plenty of antivenom,
which means that if you make it to a medical center
in enough time,
your chances of survival are exponentially increased
as long as you've received that antivenom.
Hunter, thank you so much for letting us
do this experiment today.
It was extremely educational.
And hopefully this serves as a warning as
to why I will never intentionally be bitten
by a rattlesnake.
I'm Coyote Peterson,
be brave, stay wild.
We'll see ya on the next adventure.
On average,
there are around 10,000 snake bites
in the United States every year and only a handful
ever result in fatality.
The reason so many lives are saved is directly related to
the work you witnessed here today.
Antivenom is a lifesaver,
but it comes with a financially crippling price tag.
I do say that to scare you.
And we hope that this episode serves as a priceless lesson,
never try to catch or interact with a venomous snake.
Trust me your life,
your health insurance premium,
and your bank account all rely on you making
a smart choice.
For more insight about the work being conducted
at the Reptile Discovery Center,
make sure to check out their website.