 really fascinating talks for you. You may have noticed also, the Oakland Public Library is here. You didn't get a chance. You should do so after the first talk during the break. Also, we have plate crepes. If you didn't have any, I would really recommend the pretzels. They're delicious. It's all a little bit. And natty cakes with sweet treats. You should have a boop. So our first talk is going to be about sweets. Popular culture approaches a topic, gives you a lot of insight to how people feel about it. And if you look at snakes in popular culture, you can see that our relationship with them is pretty fraught. They are pretty hated among people. And it's really difficult to find a positive representation of snakes in media. Although I'm not going to get into that, but even in children's media, children's books and films, snakes are generally really bad. I can only find one good snake that's Sammy the snake. He looks out by virtue of the letter S, meaning so similar to a snake. It gives you a tool for learning your alphabet. And he has a whole alphabet. And it seems pretty clear that we have some kind of instinctual aversion to them. So to help you really feel that, I found this. Apparently the longest snake ever found was recently found in Malaysia. You can see the folks who found it posing with a here and here. Construction site in Penang. And it was more than 26 feet long and 550 pounds. So, you know, we can say this is one of the largest snakes, but it's a password with a link. But it did not die under mysterious circumstances. It's actually quite unfortunate, but it seems pretty clear that these guys probably get addicted to death. Which is unfortunate. So this makes me wonder what was the largest snake of all time. And it turns out that in 2012 some fossils were found in South America that belong to the largest, was the largest known snake of all time. So it was aptly named Type 10. And it was, this particular one was about 40 feet long. They figure over a ton and largest snake on record. And this is the Agliocene Epic, which is interesting in that it's the period of time like right after the dinosaurs left, but before mammals really came into their own as dominant species. So it had like its moment where it was the big man on campus. And apparently they ate giant crocodiles, which is pretty badass. The snakes today, the descendants sort of went for these gigantic fellows and ladies are not quite so huge typically. But here's a rendering of what it might look like relative to some people, like a life size statue. Oh, you can see it's eating the crocodile here. Don't forget what a predator it is. Alright, so here's how awesome they are is our friend Alex from... I'm super excited to talk to you today. Gotta switch the power point, never mind. So I'm excited to talk to you today about literally my favorite topic on Earth. Snakes, I'll tell you a little bit about myself. I grew up in New Jersey from about the age of 7 in the swamp behind my house. I was catching reptiles and amphibians and just having a great time. By like age 10 or 12, what someone who studies reptiles and amphibians is called? They said that was a herpetologist and I said, okay, I'll be a herpetologist when I grow up. And ever since then, yeah, I've been traveling all over the world, catching snakes, looking... But I wasn't the first human to ever think that snakes were really fascinating. In fact, lots of snakes have been a large part of human culture pretty much since humans were around. So from ancient Greek, we get this symbol of modern medicine, the caduceus. We're not really sure why it became a symbol of modern medicine, but it is. In ancient Egypt, these white jets, these cobras, would protect pharaohs. And they would be on pharaoh's tunes and on little like hoods that they wore. In Aztec culture, Quetzalcoatl was a feathered serpent and was a creator of all humankind, which is really cool. In a bunch of different Indian cultures, snakes or naja are like protectors of various gods. They bring fertility, they bring rain, and they also bring drought and death. So really snakes have a huge role in humanity. But I would venture a guess, as Rebecca kind of told you, that they're still kind of overwhelmingly feared. So throughout my talk, I'm going to do a bunch of kind of polly audience kind of things, where I'll ask you a question and we'll have some audience participation. So I can see you, raise your hand, and yeah, so let's try this for the first time. Raise your hand if you have some inexplicable, just kind of innate fear of snakes. Raise your hand nice and high. Cool, alright, maybe everyone else who did was scared away. I'd say that's like 10% of the house. And first of all, I'm really glad that all of you came, because that takes guts. And I don't know, maybe you have the same idea as me that education is power. And maybe that by learning a little bit more about snakes, you can kind of quell some of those fears. And that's what we'll kind of do tonight. I'll go through four pretty basic myths about snakes, and then we'll try to learn about them, learn whether they're true or false, and you can have an opinion too. And then, yeah, we'll debunk them if necessary using science. Alright, on to the first one, which should be hopefully an easy one, hopefully a giveaway. The only good snake is a dead snake. So raise your hand if you think this is true. I think this is false. Sweet, alright, that was good. I'm glad that was an easy one. For the two of you that raised your hand, smart out, out. That is indeed false. So from just like a human, centric point of view, there are a lot of reasons why snakes are really important. They are medically important. So a lot of snakes are venomous. They have these modified salivary glands that inject a cocktail of proteins into their prey, which is meant to subdue or paralyze or sometimes even digest the prey that they're eating. And from those proteins, we as humans and doctors have developed a range of medicines that we probably wouldn't have discovered if it weren't for snakes and spelling snakes in the wild. So from this South American pit fight for the Parakara, we developed ACE inhibitors, one of the most commonly prescribed hypertension medicines out there. From the Black Mamba down here, we've recently discovered a painkiller that is more powerful than morphine that is not addictive and doesn't depress your respiratory rate like morphine does. And these are just two of many different examples of ways that snakes are actually medically important. Any herpetologist that you've talked to will tell you that snakes are really important in controlling rodents. And that turns out, yeah, so some people have actually gone out and quantified it. So this is a timber rattlesnake and people, snakes across populations in Maryland and it's found that at each site where timber rattlesnakes were present, timber rattlesnakes were removed to the 4,000 deer ticks per year, which deer ticks carry Lyme's disease. So that was potentially vectors of Lyme's disease being removed from the environment. Other scientists want to step further and quantify that where there was a greater number of timber rattlesnakes in Connecticut, there was a lower incidence of Lyme's disease. So fewer people came in reporting Lyme's disease and there was lower prevalence of Lyme's disease in those areas. So snakes do indeed control rodents and by doing so they also control diseases that affect humans. But really those are just human centric approaches. I think snakes are just super awesome. All sorts of different shapes and sizes and colors, in my opinion they're the most successful predators on Earth. They range from the Arctic Circle to Patagonia. They are just really, really impressive and kind of deserve to exist for their own right. So even though this is maybe something that is said more often in the South than in Illinois, we think that snakes are better alive rather than dead. Okay, myth two, maybe something more practical. Red touch yellow, killer fellow, red touch black, venom black. Raise your hand if you think this is true. Come on, raise your hand, there's no shame in being wrong. Alright, put them down, raise your hand if you think this is false. Cool, alright, so that was kind of like 70, 30, 24 years false. This is actually true. Yeah, good job. Well, it's somewhat true. So in the United States we have three coral snake species. They're all kind of banded like this where you can see that red touches yellow. Red touches yellow. And indeed they're dangerously venomous, so when red touches yellow they could indeed kill a fellow. In the United States we also have lots of things that mimic coral snakes. So they look very similar in patterns to coral snakes in the hopes that predators will not attack them because the predators think that they're coral snakes. And indeed all of the mimics in the United States, red touches black, venom black. That totally works. Alright, so here are the three coral snake species. You can see red touch yellow, red touch yellow. And here are three of many different mimics and for all of them red touches black. Things get pretty crazy when you go south of the border. So here are three coral snakes as well where shit red touches black. Those will definitely kill you if you don't touch them. These are three non-venomous coral snake mimics and they are harmless but red touches yellow. So long story short, don't fuck with any snakes south of the border. But this is actually a really cool example of evolution and something that we probably couldn't study as well if coral snakes did not have this amazing property. So this is obviously a map of southern Mexico and Central America and on the left here in every one of these figures are coral snakes and on the right is a non-venomous mimic of that coral snake. And you can see where coral snakes exist the non-venomous mimic mimics that coral snake species really well. They parallel really really closely in coloration. This is a really good example of mimicry, a cool evolutionary phenomenon. But what makes this even better is that actually all of these snakes on the right are the same species. These are just different color morphs of the same species. So this species is found or when the species is just co-distributed a little alongside a coral snake it tends to adapt to the coloration of that coral snake. And so it varies tremendously over its entire range and it really closely mimics the coral snake. A really cool example of mimicry and of evolution in action. Even when there are two coral snakes present the mimic is kind of a mix of the two there. So a really cool thing that we've learned by studying snakes. Alright, mimicry, we're getting more and more practical here. Snakes will chase you, raise your hand if you think this is true. Alright, a few passionate people, okay, raise your hand if you think this is false. Alright, this is great, you all are so easy. This is indeed false. I can tell you this just from my experience that I probably handled thousands of snakes that I never have once had them chase me. But there's actually a really cool study that people did on this just to hammer it home. So this myth kind of comes mostly from the cottonmouth, which is found in the south and center of the United States. And pretty much anyone that lives there will tell you that these are super aggressive just out to get you bad snakes that will chase you down and bite you. So some people at the University of Georgia decided to put this to a test in what I think is a really cool scientific study. They went out to the Savannah River site in Georgia, found about 75 cotton mouths and did one of three things to them. The first thing was they took a boot on a stick and they put it right next to the cottonmouth that they found. So that would be mimicking you walking in the woods and stepping right next to it. And they measured what the cotton mouths did. Next, they literally put the boot on the stick and stepped on the cottonmouth and then you stepping right on the snake to see what it did. And finally they put 11 gloves on a pair of tongs inside the sleeve and literally picked up the snake to see what it did. And here's what they found. This is really tiny and that's unfortunate. But we'll focus in on this panel right here. So this will be the proportion of snakes that showed this response. When of the 25 or so snakes that they measured, when they stepped directly beside the snake, zero of those snakes actually bit. Of the ones that they literally stepped on, only one of the 25 snakes that they measured actually bit. Even when they picked up the snake, literally like a rat, and lifted the snake off the ground, only 40% of these snakes bit. This was really compelling evidence that these snakes really aren't out to get you or aren't really aggressive, super biting snakes. In fact, you can see from here the majority of snakes just try to either attempt to flee or open their mouth and kind of show that cotton color inside their mouth that gives them their name. Some other researchers went into this a bit further and kind of measured how snakes move when you block their path. And so they gave them one definite escape route that the snake knew about and then blocked various angles of the snake. And it turns out only when you blocked the snake's angle of the snake did it seem like the snake was chasing it. And I think that sufficiently debunks this myth. Snake will not chase you unless you are blocking their escape path today. Alright, mid-forged snake, the last one, snakes rarely kill humans. Raise your hand if you think this is true. Alright, I like it. Raise your hand if you think this is false. Cool. I wish this were true, but indeed this is false. I really wish these were true. So this is a map of the total number of eventinations of snakes across the world. And focusing in here, I can just tell you that there are an estimated up to 90,000 eventinations per year. And of those, about 20,000 people die from snake bite every year. This is a huge public health issue to the point where the WHO has actually said that this is an elected tropical affliction. So this is something that not many people pay attention to, but actually really severely debilitates or kills many people throughout the world. And you can see it disproportionately affects people in tropical regions where there are a high number of venomous snakes and people often work outside and don't have access to proper footwear, proper clothing, or proper medical care for that matter. I would say that given that these are only snake bites that were reported at a hospital, this is probably an underestimation. To give you a kind of sense of optimism, despite having a ton of snakes in the United States, you probably can't read it, but on average there's only about 16 venomous snake bites per year in the United States and Canada. But you are statistically more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be hit by a snake. Of these 16 venomations, only five actually result in death. Of those five, all of them were messing with a snake. Either picking up the snake or trying to kill the snake, four of them were my drunk white dudes. So in order to avoid my drunk white dudes, it's difficult. For venomous snakes, Rebecca talked a little bit about giant snakes like this reticulated python. How often do they kill humans? Well, we really don't have that good of information about this. The best information that we do have comes from when a herpetologist teamed up with an anthropologist to kind of study this in more detail. The anthropologist lived with an active people of Busan, which are in the 70s, which are a hunter-gatherer tribe there, and he did interviews with the people there and found that of the 120 people used for this study, about one in four had a serious attack by a python, such as this one. In fact, of the 120 people in that study, six had been killed by a snake in recent memory. So that equates to two to three serious encounters with a snake per year. These are actually a significant source of mortality where these giant snakes exist. But I think the most interesting finding of this study was actually that the active people were both predators or prey of the snake, but also predators of the snake. As Rebecca mentioned, this snake can weigh upwards of 500 pounds. That's up to the same things as snakes. They're eating the pigs, they're eating the rodents, the birds, all the other things of the forest that these snakes also prey on. And so if this is kind of what humans were like when we were mostly hunter-gatherers, we can kind of predict that where we overlap with these giant snakes, they actually represented a significant source of mortality. And when you look at the primate tree of life, we find that where the primates living today overlap with these snakes, all of the major lineages share that same and competitor with these snakes. And the most simplest explanation for that is that we have been prey of predatory competitors since the common ancestor of all primates, this ancestral primate about 60 million years ago. And it has great. And about 60 million years ago, indeed the most common predators on primates were actually reptiles. And so it seems that the relationship between the humans and primates is actually a lot deeper than we might have imagined. In fact, people have done studies and have shown that both baby humans and other primates can both more quickly identify snakes in an array of, create a photo of non-threatening objects. So we can identify snakes faster than we can flowers, mushrooms, and other harmless creatures. And we can identify them once we've learned what a threatening object is like a gun. We can still identify snakes faster than we can gun a learned threatening object. So there seems to be some sort of innate ability in our minds, some sort of evolutionary previous position to think differently about snakes. Some scientists have gone further than this and have said that actually snakes themselves have influenced the way that we see. And the reason that we may see that primates often see in color and see so well may have been to detect snakes in the environment in which primates evolve because they've been such an important link in the evolution of humans. So to those of you who raised your hand at the beginning of this talk to say that you're definitely afraid of snakes, I kind of get it. I understand. I think that the fear part may be cultural, but just realizing and thinking about snakes differently than you do most other animals may be kind of evolutionary based, which I think is really, really interesting. But that's all kind of depressing. We've learned a lot about how snakes are really awesome, but also how they're really deadly. I think in closing my friend An here. I did a survey of reptiles and amphibians in southern Vietnam back in 2008 and when we first started this, An really, really hated snakes. He did not understand why anyone would want to study them. He didn't understand it at all. But after about a month of working together, we had identified probably over 100 snakes and it began to kind of appreciate the diversity that snakes come in all their shapes, sizes, ecological roles that they play and he definitely didn't like snakes by the end of it, but he could appreciate it. He could respect the nutrition that they have in our environment and also the kind of complex evolution and place that they have in the hearts of all humans. So I hope we can all do the same. Thank you. If we jump or do I am I like hey, is it my friend? I don't usually jump anymore. I get really excited. I encourage you to do the same. As you can see, we kind of put some science to it. They probably won't do anything to harm you. So just take a picture and keep on walking. Snakes do mostly travel alone. Snakes usually get together for kind of winter aggregations. They'll come together and like hibernate and have to the same area. But that's the only time we really see them in great numbers is when they're together for hibernating or breeding. Other than that, they're pretty solitary. My job is obviously finding snakes. The worst part of my job is I spend a lot of time dealing with stuff that isn't snakes. So like lots of, I do a lot, I spread the computer program. It's like just responding to emails and that's no fun. Rather be outside. One last question. Alright, one last question. Go for it. If you could be any snake, which snakes would you be? That was a good question. To be fair, I always wanted to fly. And there are flying snakes. Technically, like lighting snakes. So they're just like, it's called a paradise tree snake. It lives in Southeast Asia. They're really, really pretty. And they literally like fly through the, they're also really common. You can live in cities or in like beautiful open forests. I think that would be fine. We're going to take a 10 minute break. So our doorman and Mike went around asking many of you tribute questions about reptiles and amphibians. Some of you are holding the prize for getting those answers right. Or the first prize, which is a little plastic snake or some other reptile or amphibian. When we're back for a break, we'll have all of you on stage and we'll do some trivia. And the winner of that trivia will win some beer. So yeah, make sure that you have a plastic snake. We'll be back in 10 minutes. So, okay, we're going to run this filling piece now. So I'm going to pass the line for team 10. If your team gets the question right, you'll stay and that's on some of your channel. If you get the question wrong, rather than the portion, you'll have to leave. And the next team has a shot at answering. It's team Jeff Nolan and Jen. So if you can look at that monitor, first needs a second and then you tell the end goal. It's not as loud as the rest. But we'll see you in the next one. So you have a team name? Alright, team probably. It looks like a sea crane of some type. And it will definitely kick. What is it? We'll look at it. Are you sure? You have a team name? Woo! Team RedsQ. Uh, see how much do you want to see? What is it? What is the fastest land scene in the world? It's the Black Mamba. There you go. Next team. Just pass it by a little bit. Um... Yeah. What's up? Who is who? Who went awesome? Who went what? We know Rossum. What is she going for? We know Rossum. Oh! The adventure python. You get it. Next. Next team. They're very aggressive in the light. Um... What is it? It's really good. Currently, they're not in question. So I'll just find support. Okay. Um... These are really easy. Okay. I'm still going to do this. Because I don't want to do anything. Uh, that was a bad strategy. Um... Three, two, one. It's okay. Well, it's a problem. Okay. They're going to skate from New York. Snake Liskin? Yes. If you have any... Now we will ask you how many species of voices can be heard in the comment. Only one. Only one. Okay. That's not enough. How many anacondas have been abandoned for 20 years in anacondas? Within this series, anaconda. What? No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Three. Including to you. Or four. Sometimes the next me. So the question is, what's the difference between poisons and madness? They're mis-injected and poisons are even absorbed. At this stage, I actually want to hear about adoption, and I want to know. So, I'm going to go to the stage and I'll ask you what kind of beer you want. I'm going to please bring to the stage my pre-part, who was talking about adoption. It's easy to get rid of being a riddle to children because I'm going to show them how old I am for all this. And Rebecca, how many and how many do you show? What? How many and how many do you show today? Five. Or five? Shouldn't be time too fast. I know. Please jam for the rest of the show.