- Today, I am going to take eight vials of my own blood
and add to that blood,
venom from three of the most potent pit vipers
here in the United States.
We have a medic that is going to stick me with a needle
and draw out these eight vials of blood.
And right now I'm feeling very very nervous
and a little squeamish
and I might pass out during this process.
Okay, here we go.
Giving my blood for science.
(yelling)
(energetic music)
Today, we are at the Reptile Discovery Center
located in Deland, Florida.
This serpentarium is home to several
of the world's most dangerous snakes.
And earlier today,
I assisted in milking the venom of three pit vipers
that are frequently encountered
in the Eastern United States.
The Copperhead.
Wow, that was fantastic.
The Water Moccasin.
Gonna go mouth down, okay.
And the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake.
Whoa!
That was a serious venom yield right there.
Normally this venom
is sent to their med toxin venom laboratory
where it is turned into life-saving antivenom.
But today, we're going to perform an experiment
unlike anything you have ever seen.
Okay, crew is all set up.
(sighs) All right guys,
so today's experiment is going to show us what happens
when snake venom mixes together with human blood.
I've always been curious what happens
when a snake bites you
and that venom enters into the bloodstream.
So today, what we're gonna do
is take eight vials of my blood,
we're gonna create a control,
and then we're going to mix venom into three different vials
and show you exactly what happens.
I know, it seems like Coyote, get to the point already.
I'm only prolonging this
because I'm so squeamish around needles.
You guys have no idea how nervous I am right now.
I could take bullet ant stings,
I can take bites from giant desert centipedes,
when it comes to sticking a needle into my arm,
nothing makes my skin crawl more than that.
We've got a medic on set with us
and she is going to safely draw out my blood.
- [Medic] I need you to just keep your arm very still.
- Very still.
- [Medic] Don't jerk it back.
And if you feel like you're gonna pass out, tell me.
- Okay.
- [Medic] If you get lightheaded
or you start to feel really hot.
- Okay.
I'm already hot, I'm sweating bullets right now.
Like more nervous than I was for ants, centipedes,
like (grunts) worst day ever.
- [Medic] Well even hotter than you are right now.
- Okay, yup.
- [Medic] Okay are you ready?
- Yes, I can be ready.
- [Medic] 1, 2, 3.
(yelling)
- Find a happy place, find a happy place.
Is this considered a lot of blood for one sitting?
- [Medic] This is an okay amount.
It's certainly not gonna harm you.
- Okay.
I'm gonna put the GoPro down at what this is
to see what's happening.
I can't look with my own eyes, I can't bear.
I can't feel my arm.
Like, should I be doing anything with my arm?
- [Medic] No.
(breathing)
Okay, you ready?
- For what?
- [Medic] I'm gonna take out the needle.
(yelling)
Are you ready?
- Is it out?
- [Medic] No.
- Yeah, I'm ready.
(yelling)
Oh my gosh, is it gonna like squirt blood if you,
oh my God, look at all those tubes of blood.
Holy mackerel.
But what we're going to do now
is head down the hallway,
meet up with Carl,
and move to step two of this experiment.
Holy cow, look at all of these vials of blood.
That is so much Coyote that is spilled out
in the name of science.
Okay Carl, I am back with eight vials of my blood.
Now we're only gonna need four for this experiment
so I'll put these other four over here as a backup.
And we've got the entire experiment set up.
We've got three vials
that contain Copperhead, Water Moccasin,
and Eastern Diamondback venom.
Eventually that blood is going to trickle down this board
that we've created.
But before we get there,
let's talk about these venom's
and why they're so potentially dangerous.
- Okay, so Coyote, all three of these snakes
cause you to bleed,
cause you to hemorrhage,
and hemorrhaging is dangerous for a host of reasons.
Your blood doesn't clot,
you're losing blood from your blood vessels,
your blood corpuscles are being broken apart,
your red blood cells are being liced,
they're not carrying oxygen to your tissues.
They all cause you to hemorrhage.
They do it a little differently.
The mechanisms that work do it a little differently,
but they all cause
that significant bleeding coagulopathy problem.
- Okay, man that is complex,
but sounds very painful at the same time.
Obviously a lot of pain is experienced
with a bite from any one of these snake species.
Okay, so I'm definitely going to put on my safety goggles
for this part.
I am going to open up this vial and expose the venom.
Now, I have this one labeled Copperhead,
and you'll see, I also have a blunt tipped needle.
The reason for that is if this was sharp
and I were to accidentally prick myself,
that's just like a snake fang.
What you don't want to do is envenomate yourself
while working with venom.
So, I'm gonna just,
oh man, makes your hand nervous
just to pick up and hold what that is right there.
That is some very potent venom.
Now, Carl I'm gonna need your assistance.
If you can just tilt that a tiny bit
until I'm able to get some venom.
I think that's enough.
- Yep.
- That's probably more than a full snake bite right there.
- No question.
- Okay, so there is our Copperhead venom.
Woo, one down.
Our next one is going to be the Water Moccasin.
Wow, look at that venom yield.
- Gives you a sense of how dangerous Cottonmouths can be
and part of that equation again is yield.
That's three snakes of course, but even still.
Here we go.
Ooh, that is a toxic little mix right there.
Oh, got a little drip coming.
Okay, I'll just put that there.
And now we are going to bring up
the most potent of them all,
the Eastern Diamondback.
Woo, this is the big one right here, all right.
There we go.
And that right there
would be enough venom to kill you, wouldn't it?
- Probably.
- Okay, so we've got our three syringes of venom lined up.
Thank you, Carl.
Woo, this is, keeping your hand study is not an easy thing.
Okay, so the first one,
our green is going to be the Copperhead.
Okay.
There we go.
Dangerous little tube right there.
Okay, moving on to the Water Moccasin
labeled yellow, caution Water Moccasins can be deadly.
Definitely not a snake you ever want to trifle with
in the wild.
Admire these guys from a very safe distance.
Okay, there we go.
That is moccasin venom going into my blood.
And last but certainly not least,
will be the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake.
Okay, it's still a very very dangerous syringe right there.
There's still some venom residue.
Okay, here we go.
That is Eastern Diamondback Venom going into my blood.
Okay, well let's take 15 minutes.
We will return and step three of this experiment
will tell us exactly what happens
from a visual perspective
when you add snake venom to human blood.
But I know a lot of you out there have said before,
Coyote, you've been bitten and stung by so many things,
get bitten by a venomous snake.
Now Carl, I want to open up this conversation to you
to say to everybody out there watching
how crazy is that notion of intentionally being bitten
by a venomous snake.
And just so we're clear guys,
I'm never going to intentionally take on a bite,
like something from a Copperhead
or Water Moccasin or Rattlesnake.
And tell us why this is so damaging.
- Because insect stings and snake bites
are very different things.
And so insect venom's to a large degree
evolved to cause pain
and basically what they're trying to do
is get you away from perhaps their nest
or something of that nature.
Snake venom's evolved to immobilize and kill
the food that they eat.
And so snake venom's are destructive
on a whole host of different levels.
So you've got blood chemistry problems,
you've got neurological issues happening,
you've got cardiac issues happening,
a depolarization of the muscle cells in your heart,
you've got maybe all of these things,
nephrotoxicity, miotoxicity,
cytotoxicity, cardiotoxicity, neurotoxicity.
A snake bite can be very dangerous event.
In fact, it can be a lethal event
and on a cellular level it's catastrophic.
It's nothing to be fooled with or taken lightly.
There's no question about that.
- Okay, it has been roughly 15 minutes
that the venom has been percolating inside of my blood.
And that was the big moment,
what I'm curious about,
what I know you guys are all curious about,
what exactly happened to my blood with that venom inside.
So the first thing that we're gonna do
is put on my safety glasses.
Always important to have on safety glasses
when you're doing science experiments.
So we've got another blunt tipped needle,
that is the control.
That's the blood that's in here
and when I hold it up and look at it,
yep that's still looks super liquidy.
So what we're going to do
is pull blood from each one of these vials
and I'm gonna make a little streak
just like that on the top of this plexiglass board,
we're going to see what happens.
Does it run down?
Does it turn into jelly?
We don't know, right?
- It'll be interesting.
- I guess we'll see.
And I'm just going to try
to make a nice little streak across here
just like that.
(yelling)
What!
That is some coagulation right there, isn't it Carl?
- Can see that coagulation, yep, that's great.
- Well, that looks like a zombie film right there.
So Carl tell us what happened
'cause there was no venom in there
yet you got these chunks of blood
that just looked like they vomited themselves down
this plexiglass plate.
- When you expose blood to oxygen,
it's gonna begin to clot.
- Right.
- And so that's what we're seeing there.
- And that's healthy blood then.
- Absolutely.
- Healthy blood exposed to oxygen is going to coagulate.
So for the most part looks like I'm healthy.
So, now we're moving on to the Copperhead.
That is our green vial here.
And I'm just gonna give that a tilt
left and right.
Now like you were saying, Carl,
that anticoagulant makes this look
like it's a whole lot,
- Very hard to say if we're gonna see anything
to the naked eye,
but I assure you what's going on in that tube right now,
cellularly, is as we talked about earlier, catastrophic.
- Okay.
- So let's see if we can see anything with the naked eye.
- Here we go, Copperhead blood coming up.
Wow, look at all those bubbles.
I did not really see that on the control.
Okay, here we go.
Oh, wow, look at that.
It's just dripping right out of it.
I'm not even applying any pressure yet and look at that,
it's just dripping right out of the syringe.
- Whoa, look at that.
- Boy, it's certainly to the naked eye
looks like it's less coagulation going on there, right?
I mean to the naked eye,
I mean that just ran down to where now,
I saw a couple of little micro maybe clots in there,
but to the naked eye,
I don't know about what you saw,
but anyway, interesting.
- That was blood running down that incredibly fast.
I mean just the pace at which it slid down
and off the plexiglass,
you can see that a lot of the blood here
is still not streaking.
This was, yeah.
Look, you can almost see the more watery consistency of it.
So that's the blood cells breaking down
and not being able to hold onto each other
- Again to the naked eye,
that's what it would look like.
- Again guys, we can't stress enough
how the internal aspects of what's happening
on a micro level,
that if we had a super powerful microscope,
we'd be able to see are happening.
I mean, this is just explosions
of blood cells and everything
breaking down apart inside.
- All those little cell walls are being effected.
- Okay, here we go.
Water Moccasin.
You can see there.
the blood definitely looks very thin as well.
Again, a whole cocktail of proteins and toxins
that are just turning this blood into who knows what.
I get it, oh wow.
So that's having trouble actually sucking the blood
up into there.
- See a little more clotting in this sample.
- There we go, okay.
And my glasses are fogging up.
I'm gonna do my best to keep my hand steady,
but even interacting with venom and blood
definitely gets your heart rate going that's for sure.
That is my blood mixed together with water moccasin venom.
And again, you can see that that blood
just wants to come out of the tip of the needle
without me applying any pressure.
It's just dripping out on its own.
So I'm going to very slowly
apply a little bit of pressure.
There we go, wow, look at that.
- Now there's certainly some clots visible in that sample.
- Oh yeah.
- More so than the Copperhead venom.
- Yeah, that is true.
Look at that, you can just still see all that.
It looks like a worm
going down to the side of the plexiglass.
- But certainly the Copperhead venom
appeared thinner than the Cottonmouth venom
in relationship to the control.
Tough to say, but maybe we're seeing
some anticoagulant activity there, maybe.
- Okay, so here we go.
I've got the Eastern Diamondback venom in my blood there.
Top coming back off.
There we go.
Syringe going in,
again guys, flat tipped needles,
even if I were to prick myself with a needle with venom,
that is just like suffering envenomation.
Oh yeah, look at that.
Look how thin that blood is.
That pulls up way easier
than the Copperhead or the Moccasin.
Wow, look how watery that is, that's crazy.
What does human blood look like once it's been envenomated
with Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake venom?
Here we go, one, two, three,
oh there is a little bit of coagulation there.
Whoa, look at that.
- Some significant clotting
and remember on this, Coyote,
Eastern Diamondback venom,
we think there are both anticoagulant
and pro-coagulant activity happening.
But that's interesting.
- Okay, well there we have it
between the control, the Copperhead,
the Moccasin and the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake,
visually across the board,
it looks like there's quite a bit of difference, right?
Even with the control,
I don't see any speckling in the blood
as compared to these three.
But from your expert perspective, Carl,
what is it that we're really seeing here?
I mean, it looks like a horror film,
but it's tough to tell with the naked eye.
- Yeah.
So Coyote, I think we need to point out
that this experiment is a really crude experiment.
You know, what we're seeing,
we're kind of speculating a little bit
and based a little bit on what we know
about these given snake venom's,
but this really needs to be done under a microscope
in a really controlled setting
where we don't have this time difference going on
and we're not sure that the amount of venom being used
is exact to get a real sense of this.
But I think it's safe to say
that what's happening here,
whether or not we can see it with the naked eye
is serious and catastrophic damage on a cellular level.
- And I think for everybody out there watching,
not only did I hear you say that we need to do this again,
which means there will be a sequel to this video,
but that the big takeaway is
the pit vipers in the United States
have the potential to be very dangerous.
This is not a species
you would ever want to interact with in the wild.
And for everybody out there that's asked,
Coyote, will you get bitten by a venomous snake?
The answer is no.
You guys can see that this is again catastrophic.
If you're bitten by one of these snakes,
it is a medical emergency
and with all of our content,
we want to encourage the viewers to admire these animals
from a safe distance.
Don't try to kill them.
Don't try to catch them.
Don't ever experiment with yourself
to see what would happen if you tangled with these things.
- No question.
I think that's an excellent synopsis.
And hey man, are you gonna clean this up?
- I will, yes.
I will clean up all of the mess
that I have made here in the lab.
But for everybody out there watching
who's wanted to see what would happen
if Coyote Peterson was bitten by a venomous snake,
there ya have it guys, my blood tangling with venom.
I'm Coyote Peterson.
Be brave, stay wild.
We'll see ya on the next adventure.
Every year around the world,
people are bitten by venomous snakes.
And it's probably accurate to say
that each and every one of these bites happens by accident.
Some species like the Copperhead are likely to kill you,
but a full on envenomation from a Eastern Diamondback
is certain to take your life
without the administration of antivenom.
Carl and Mora perform thousands of milkings every year,
risking their own lives
just in case you were unfortunately bitten
by one of these slithering reptiles.
Yet that doesn't mean you should be afraid of snakes.
Almost all bites come as a result
of humans trying to move, harass,
or kill one of these animals.
The best course of action
is to always respect snakes from a safe distance,
ensuring that you do not have a catastrophic interaction.
If you would like to learn more about snakes
and the power of their venom,
make sure to visit the Reptile Discovery Center's website,
where you can schedule a snake milking demonstration.
Hey Coyote pack,
if you thought milking
some of North America's most deadly snakes was intense,
make sure to go back and watch the episode
where we milked Australia's most toxic snakes.
And don't forget,
subscribe, click the notification bell
and join memberships so you can follow along
with me and the crew on our next wild adventure.