Did you know that rattlesnakes regulate the volume of their venom? A mouse needs only a little dose and a rat a little more. A rabbit may receive a little more venom than a rat. Rattlers sometimes bite humans without injecting venom. A snake that feels in danger may "deliver everything it has." About 6,000 people are bitten in North America each year. In about 80 percent of those cases, experts say, the victim was trying to handle the snake. A half century ago, fatalities were common. Not so today. Medical treatment is usually nearby, and antivenin is effective. Only one in about 700 bites results in death. If you don't die, the greatest danger is hock caused by dangerously low blood pressure that can deprive the brain and other organs of oxygen. Some snakebite victims bleed internally. Even with treatment, a survivor might lose flesh, muscle tissue, nerves, bone, even a limb.

Don't think rattlesnake venom is all that bad? Think again. A well-known snake expert, 61-year old Joe Wasilewski, was recently bitten in Florida and nearly lost his life. And that was someone who knew what he was doing— someone who has handled hundreds thousands of snakes during the last 50 years. Someone also used to handling crocodiles. But all it took was one mean viper to "deliver everything it has" and this expert almost didn't make it. Writer Jeff Klinkenberg of the Tampa Bay Times reported the story:

Wasilewski had opened a cage and used a short pole to lift a buzzing 4-foot diamondback rattlesnake. In a well-practiced move, he slid the snake into a garbage can for safekeeping while he cleaned the cage. Then it was time to reverse the process. Hook the snake in the middle, position head away from you, slide it back into the cage. But then Joe felt a sharp sting in his left forearm.

"Oh, oh,'' he told his son, Nick. "I think he got me.'' While his son called 911, Wasilewski got a funny metallic taste in his mouth. His lips tingled, he sweated profusely, he threw up. By the time he was taken to the hospital, Wasilewski was unconscious. His blood wasn't clotting. He'd received eight vials of antivenin. Then he got another eight. His arm was grotesque and swollen. Standing next to his dad's bed in intensive care, Nick stared in shock at the stricken arm. The twitching muscles made it look like worms wriggling under the skin.

Antivenin costs about $3,200 a vial. Why so expensive? First, lots of venomous snakes have to be captured. Their venom is extracted and injected into horses and sheep, whose blood forms antibodies against the poison. Finally, the animal blood is made into a product to treat humans.

Eventually Wasilewski improved. Opened his eyes. Talked. Then suffered a relapse. His blood had stopped clotting again. The swollen arm was turning black. Over the next three days his doctor ordered another 32 vials. Joe endured tubes up his nose, down his throat, in his penis, in his arm. Morphine. Fog. Day, night, another day. Improvement. Awake. Tubes came out. Ate some food. For the first time in more than a week, this man who was used to being around rattlesnakes, felt alive.

"I can't take another bite like that,'' Joe told friends who stopped by his home after Joe was released from the hospital. Joe has two Eastern diamondbacks. He has decided that he'll keep one of them for educational purposes. The other he'll give to a pal in Central Florida in the venom business. It is amazing that this South Florida longtime reptile wrangler has no hard feelings. “It was my own fault,” said Wasilewski. “I got careless. It’s not the snake’s fault.” 

If a situation can happen to this expert, imagine what can happen out of the blue when hiking, hunting, stacking wood, or camping in rattlesnake habitat without the right protection. Don't take a chance!  When in the desert or woods -- anywhere rattlesnakes are known to live -- protect yourself with snake gaiters or snake boots. This type of snake bite protection enables YOU to "deliver everything you have" when it comes to not getting bitten.

The Burmese python, a native of India and other parts of Asia, has recently become an out-of-control menace in the Florida Everglades. No one knows exactly how these snakes got out of control. The guess is that they most likely developed from pets released into the wild, either intentionally or in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992. These snakes eat native species like alligators and endangered egrets, and are a threat to humans and their pets. These snakes have no natural predators, so wildlife officials are racing to control the python population. The U.S. Department of Agriculture received a patent in August for a trap that resembles a long, thin cage with a net at one end for the live capture of large, heavy snakes.

The Gainesville field station for the National Wildlife Research Center, which falls under the USDA, is preparing to test the trap in a natural enclosure that contains five pythons. Over the coming months, the researchers will try baiting the traps with the scent of rats and python pheromones. The wire traps will be camouflaged as pipes or other small, covered spaces where pythons like to hide. The 5-foot-long trap is made from galvanized steel wire with a tightly woven net secured to one end. Two separate triggers need to be tripped simultaneously for it to close, which should keep it from snapping shut on such native snakes as the eastern diamondback rattlesnake or the water moccasin. Of course a pair of snake gaiters will keep humans from being bitten by rattlesnakes and other deadly vipers, but gaiters, boots or chaps won't protect you from pythons.

In an effort to control the snake population, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission allows hunters with special permits to remove pythons and other exotic reptiles from some state lands. Earlier this year, a state-sanctioned hunt that attracted worldwide media attention was held. Roughly 1,600 amateur python hunters joined the permit holders for a month, netting a total of 68 snakes.  A prolonged cold snap has proven to be one of the better methods of python population control, killing off large numbers of the snakes in 2010. The population rebounded, though, because low temperatures aren't reliable in subtropical South Florida. And with plentiful food around, the pythons can get really big! The longest python ever caught in Florida was an 18-foot-8-inch specimen found in May beside a rural Miami-Dade County road.

Everglades National Park encompasses 1.5 million acres, and all but roughly 100,000 acres of that is largely inaccessible swampland and sawgrass, so it's not easy tracking down Burmese pythons. The new traps are definitely an experiment. It may work, or it may not. Traps have been used in the park to collect pythons for research, but not for population control. The area may turn out to be too vast for steel traps to be effective. Time will tell.