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Monks are heroes in Burma
Myanmar photo essay: Calm before the storm (with multimedia)
Study finds arsenic threats in SE Asia
Arsenic risk high in Sumatra, Myanmar, Cambodia: study
Once Bitten

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Monks are heroes in Burma
thespectrum. com
July10, 2008

They are more prominent in the villages right now, since the government has cracked down on them in urban areas, but they're everywhere in Burma. With shaved heads and flowing maroon colored robes (yellow "saffron" robes are worn elsewhere), Burmese monks are at the forefront of flood relief efforts and man the front lines of a not-so-quiet resistance movement.

Boys as young as 7 can enter monkhood, and young men often join for a short time as a way to honor their families. Only about 15 percent of Burma's monks decide to make it a lifelong calling.

There are about 500,000 monks in Burma, and they don't stay in isolated shrines. They live among the people, are supported by them and serve in many capacities. They also have a strong tradition of activism that has frequently crossed into the political sphere. They supported pro-independence groups during British colonial rule. In 1988, they supported a pro-democracy movement that was able to change the junta's leadership (after 3,000 people were killed) and wrested some reform measures from the authoritarian government.

When an emboldened democratic opposition won elections in 1990 and the junta refused to step down, the monks "excommunicated" the regime by refusing all government donations. In Buddhist culture, the giving of alms (through the monks) conveys blessings and legitimacy. The government responded by tightly restricting activities of senior monks and making a clumsy PR effort to highlight the building of temples.

In September of 2007, unrest surged again joined by thousands of monks. The protests initially were about poor economic conditions but morphed into demands for greater freedom. In successively larger marches, thousands of red-robed monks walked peacefully through the streets. The regime, however, eventually sent soldiers to violently disperse protesters (monks among them) and imprisoned many. Only a few deaths among the monks were reported, but numbers are disputed.

The 2007 "saffron revolution" drove the wedge between the people and government even deeper, and for most everyday Burmese the bravery and dedication of the monks was highlighted. During the mass marches, students and regular citizens walked alongside the monks, forming human walls to protect them from soldiers' batons and bullets.

The devastation of Cyclone Nargis in May (more than 80,000 dead and about 50,000 missing) and the despicable reaction of the government has increased the stature of the monks still further. While the regime refused to allow most foreign aid organizations in and turned away a U.S. military humanitarian task force, the monks have been at work.

Again, they have refused donations from the regime (pointedly denying the junta any popular legitimacy) and are coordinating with donor organizations directly. Many donors are now only working with the monks to deliver aid.

Fortunately, a second wave of deaths (from hunger and disease) has been averted. But across Burma, the credit goes to monks who stood with the people, died with them in the floods and mobilized to help them recover. The regime is more reviled than ever. It is the monks who have legitimacy.

Tad Trueblood has more than 20 years in the U.S. Air Force and the national security community. He blogs at www.thiscouldgetint eresting. com.

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Myanmar photo essay: Calm before the storm (with multimedia)
Photographs by Scott Klepper
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 05/27/2008 03:43:00 PM MDT

One of the many vendors selling fruits and vegetables along the streets and... (Scott Klepper)

Less than six weeks before Cyclone Nargis hit, Scott Klepper of Cottonwood Heights was relishing the beauty of Myanmar (formerly and still often referred to as Burma) in southeast Asia. Given the country's ruling military junta, and its violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests last year, Klepper, 47, didn't come across many other tourists in his travels. What the business consultant did see was a place where the warmth of the people and the awe-inspiring landscape belied the troubled politics.

Klepper, an amateur photographer, chronicled the nearly two weeks he spent in Myanmar and shares a glimpse inside, before disaster struck.
- Jessica Ravitz

Calm Before the Storm



Some locals visit and pray at Shwedagon Paya during the heat of the day. (Scott Klepper)

Above right, a boat carrying supplies from Inle Lake passes by the Nyaungshwe boat dock. (Scott Klepper )

http://www.sltrib.com/columnists/ci_9370254

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Study finds arsenic threats in SE Asia
AP
By MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer1 hour, 28 minutes ago

Myanmar's cyclone-devastated Irrawaddy delta and Indonesia's Sumatra island face high risks of arsenic contamination in groundwater that could cause cancer and other diseases in residents, according to a new study.

Using a digitalized model that examines geological features and soil chemistry in Southeast Asia, researchers writing in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience mapped several likely hot spots that had never been assessed for arsenic risks.

"Obviously, there is concern," said Michael Berg, one of the five authors, who is a senior scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Dubendor, Switzerland. "If you look at our data, there is risk of arsenic in the ground water."

Arsenic, especially in drinking water, is a global threat to health, affecting more than 70 countries and 137 million people. The country worst affected is Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of people are in danger of dying from cancers of the lung, bladder and skin.

Odorless and tasteless, arsenic enters water supplies from natural deposits in the ground or from agricultural and industrial practices. Arsenic is poisonous when consumed in high doses, but even smaller amounts can cause cancer, skin problems and abnormal heart rhythms.

Berg and the other authors determined a high risk of arsenic contamination exceeding World Health Organization guidelines in Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta, a low-lying area hit by a May cyclone that killed at least 84,537 people.

Their models also found that 38,610 square miles of Sumatra's east coast was at risk as well as the Chao Phraya river basin in central Thailand — although the dangers in the Chao Phraya were lower because residents in the area tap deeper aquifers.

Researchers said regions with organic-rich sediment containing silt and clay have a higher likelihood of arsenic contamination.

"These are very young sediments. Only in young formation do we find that arsenic can be released from the sediment," Berg said Friday, adding that arsenic in soil that is much older has been mostly washed away.

Berg said he hopes the maps they developed could serve as "a red flag" for authorities to take precautions before building wells or other water facilities in areas deemed at high risk of arsenic contamination. Until now, testing for arsenic has been rare in many regions because it is costly and time consuming, he said.

Lex van Geen, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has studied arsenic contamination in Bangladesh and did not participate in the study, said it should be lauded for drawing attention to areas where little research has been done on the arsenic threat, such as Myanmar. But he said the digital models do not identify areas well below the surface where water quality is good.

"Using the mapping based on surface geology will identify settings where arsenic could be high in shallow groundwater," van Geen said. "What it can't tell you is how deep you might have to go to reach the low arsenic water, which is really what matters from a mitigation point of view."

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Arsenic risk high in Sumatra, Myanmar, Cambodia: study
AFP
Fri Jul 11, 2:15 PM ET

Eastern Sumatra, the Irrawaddy delta in Myanmar and Cambodia's Tonle Sap lake are among areas in Southeast Asia facing a high risk of arsenic contamination in the water, according to a study published on Friday.

The researchers use innovative digitalised techniques, drawing on geology, geography and soil chemistry, to compile a "probability map" of naturally-occurring arsenic concentrations in five Southeast Asian countries and Bangladesh.

The map is intended as a useful pointer for health watchdogs, urban planners and water engineers worried about concentrations of this poison in groundwater supplies but lacking the funds to carry out wide-scale analysis of water samples.

Published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the Swiss-led study combined several methods to compile its probability model.

These included knowledge about sediments whose textures and chemical or bacterial properties could release arsenic from the local ore, thus contaminating aquifers.

Also factored in were areas with flat, low-lying topography. Arsenic contamination is rarely found in places with slopes.

The benchmark for risk was the World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline of 0.01 milligrams of arsenic per litre in drinking water.

The study predicted that in Bangladesh -- which has the worst arsenic contamination in the world -- the risk of water breaching this guideline was highest in the south-centre of the country and in the northeastern Sylhet basin.

This prediction concurred with water samples previously taken and analysed from tube wells in Bangladesh.

High probabilities of arsenic contamination were also seen for the deltas of the Irrawaddy in Myanmar and the Red River in Bangladesh, for the Chao Praya basin in central Thailand and for the organic-rich sediments of the flood plain of Cambodia's Tonle Sap lake.

The computer model said an area of about 100,000 square kilometres (38,600 square miles) on the east coast of Indonesia's main island, Sumatra, was likewise "prone to high risk" of contamination above the WHO benchmark.

This prediction was then borne out by samples taken from a zone in Sumatra deemed to have high-risk and low-risk aquifers.

However, many wells in this area are deep and draw water from below the water-bearing sediments which have the arsenic problem, the study says.

"The prediction map is a useful tool for identification of areas at risk of arsenic contamination, but... understanding the local geology as a function of depth is of vital importance for specific areas," it cautions.

In Bangladesh, tens of millions of people are potentially exposed to arsenic-tainted water, boosting the danger of skin lesions, respiratory illness and cancer.

The risk comes from so-called shallow tube wells which were drilled in the 1970s and 1980s, ironically in a bid to provide rural Bangladeshis with safe water. Millions of these pipes were installed.

The new study is lead-authored by Michael Berg of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Duebendorf.

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Once Bitten
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: July 13, 2008

Some years ago, in South Africa, I took a course in becoming a game ranger, which included an afternoon devoted to snakes: tracking them, identifying them, treating bites. Our young teacher had a horrendous scar resembling a boot lace running the length of his arm. He enjoyed letting his pets slide around inside his clothes, he explained. One day, as an adder luxuriated in his sleeve, his mother had let the screen door slam behind her. The startled snake bit him. He lived, but a doctor had slit open his swelling arm to keep it from bursting.

Dong Lin, from “The Snake Chamber”
Joe Slowinski
THE SNAKE CHARMER
A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge.
By Jamie James.
Illustrated. 260 pp. Hyperion. $24.95.

Related
First Chapter: ‘The Snake Charmer’ (July 12, 2008)

Something in the way he told the tale left me feeling not terribly sorry for him. He was still bragging — an exhibitionist with a death wish. I kept getting the same feeling as I read “The Snake Charmer,” Jamie James’s brief biography of Joe Slowinski, a promising herpetologist at the California Academy of Sciences who died at age 38 on a collecting trip to Burma.

No matter how hard James tries to make Slowinski sound roguishly charming, how often he mentions his “disarming, gap-toothed smile,” how earnestly he swears in the epilogue that he sorely feels the loss of someone he never met, I could not help reading between the lines: intentionally or not, he makes his subject sound like a Class A jerk.
It isn’t Slowinski’s redneck genius persona — meeting academy donors in a baggy T-shirt, smuggling reptiles without permits, kicking down his own door to impress a date when he forgets his keys. That was just snake shtick. Nor is it his earlier “starving graduate student my work is everything” ethos, even when he shouts at his not-well-off father for offering to buy him a table so they don’t have to eat while sitting on the stairs. Nor is it the poses James puts him in: the boy Hercules, age 5, brandishing a rat snake “as thick as his own little arm,” or the carnival man dazzling Burmese villagers just before his death, the sun “glinting penny-bright” on his goatee as he “free-handled the dangerous serpent they called ngan taw kyar (‘royal tiger snake’) with cool bravado.”

Rather, it’s his ruthlessness. His toying with snakes while drunk, terrifying friends. His treatment of his only long-term girlfriend, whom he dumps over the phone. His theft of the prize specimens of a Brazilian herpetologist; caught with her snakes dead in his freezer, he blames the language barrier, claiming he thought she’d granted permission. And the coup de grâce is his final, fatal blunder. Relying on bribes and half-truths, he smuggles an expedition of 16 scientists and 130 porters into one of the most remote and malarial corners of the world without official permission or a doctor — just a first-aid kit so meager it wouldn’t have served a Boy Scout camp-out.

That decision — no antivenin, no respirator, no escape plan — comes back to bite him in the form of a 10-inch many-banded krait he encounters when he, in another foggy morning hangover, thrusts his hand into the previous day’s collecting bags without checking them. His calm in giving instructions as he feels paralysis coming on is admirable. And the 30 hours his team spends giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, trying to keep him oxygenated until the venom can wear off, is nothing short of heroic. It’s all the more engaging because it’s one of those losing medical battles we usually see waged in TV emergency rooms, not on the floor of a tin-roofed schoolhouse in a village named Rat Baw. But still, I couldn’t help empathizing with the snake.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. is a science reporter and former foreign correspondent for The Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/review/McNeil-t.html

‘The Snake Charmer’
By JAMIE JAMES
Many-Banded Krait

No snake kills with more ruthless efficiency than the many-banded krait, which dwells in the jungles of India and Southeast Asia. Drop for drop, its venom is the deadliest of any land serpent's, apart from a few rare species found only in the outback of Australia. One bite of the krait carries enough concentrated toxin to kill two dozen grown men.

American soldiers during the war in Vietnam called it the "two-step snake," in the belief that its venom is so lethal that if it bites you, you will fall dead after taking just two steps. That's an exaggeration, but the bite of the many-banded krait is astonishingly potent. The venom is a neurotoxin, which means that it disables the victim's nervous system — like yanking an electrical plug out of the socket. Death comes when neurotransmission ceases: With no instructions to breathe, the muscles of the diaphragm are stilled, and the victim asphyxiates.

Usually the victim of the many-banded krait is another snake; because the species is cannibalistic, it might even be another krait. Yet it never seeks larger prey. The last thing it wants is a brush with a human being; the snake is far more likely to end up dead from the encounter than the person is. But the many-banded krait is built to kill, and if it is threatened, it can only do what it is programmed to do: It bites.

Most people go to great lengths to avoid meeting a many-banded krait, but in 2001, biologist Joe Slowinski traveled from San Francisco, where he was a curator of herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences, to Upper Burma, expressly to look for them — and all the other reptiles and amphibians he could find. Joe was one of the leading experts in the world on the venomous snakes of Asia, and his latest expedition was the most ambitious scientific mission in Burma's history: He was leading fifteen naturalists and more than a hundred Burmese support staff into wilderness terrain that was scarcely known to science.

It might seem logical to deduce from the wide availability and superfine detail of satellite mapping that the wilderness of Earth has now been fully charted, all its secrets exposed. Yet that is far from the case: There are still vast tracts of the planet that remain almost unexplored. Burma, which many people now call Myanmar, the Southeast Asian country west of Thailand, is one of the most poorly studied places in the world. Neglected by British scientists in colonial times, ripped apart by civil war in the postwar period, and brutally plundered by its own corrupt military regime since a coup in 1988, Burma hasn't had time for science. In his memoir Burma's Icy Mountains, the British botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward, one of the few foreign explorers to venture there, observed after an expedition in 1937, "North Burma is an excellent example of a country which is surveyed but not explored."

Since Kingdon-Ward's day, much of the rest of the world has been studied intensively, but Burma remains terra virtually incognita — a potential treasure house for an enterprising biologist. When a former student of Joe Slowinski's discovered a new species of nonvenomous snake in Louisiana a few months before Joe's expedition, it was the first new serpent species to be identified in North America in more than half a century. Yet the wildlife of Burma remains so little known that Joe and his small band of American and Burmese colleagues discovered new species on virtually every expedition and projected that their research would eventually yield more than fifty previously unknown reptiles and amphibians — perhaps as many as one hundred and fifty. Here, in the foothills of the Himalayas, the most remote region he had yet studied, Joe expected to discover many new species.

Joe Slowinski and his team — botanists, ichthyologists, and ornithologists, experts on insects and mammals — were foot soldiers in Darwin's army. Modern biologists, armed with sophisticated technology, are continuing the great intellectual adventure of compiling a comprehensive census of life on Earth, an audacious enterprise launched in the Enlightenment and given its theoretical foundation by Darwin himself, and carrying it forward into the twenty-first century.

It was late summer, the stormy end of the monsoon. No sensible person who wanted to come to Putao District, Kachin State, in uppermost Burma, would contemplate going there during the rainy season. But frogs love water, and where there are frogs, there are snakes to eat them. Joe had expected muddy trails, bad food, and squalid campsites; as far as he was concerned, that was all part of the fun. Yet this expedition set a new standard of misery. The rain had poured almost incessantly since they set out from Putao, the small town that served as the administrative capital of this isolated region. The trail was a deep river of fine, clinging clay mud. Malarial mosquitoes and sharp-biting sandflies swirled in tormenting clouds; legions of thirsty leeches lurked in every dank, dark recess.

Most dispiriting of all, the snake collecting had been poor. Yes, rain brings out snakes, but not when it's as heavy as this. How can you find snakes to catch when the rain sheets down so densely that you can scarcely make out the back of the hiker ten feet ahead of you?

On September 9, the expedition reached a village called Rat Baw, by far the most advanced settlement the group had seen since leaving Putao. It even had a street paved with cobblestones and a frame schoolhouse with a tin roof — rare luxuries in a region where most people shared smoky bamboo huts with their livestock. The scientists made their camp in the school, the first dry berth they had had in many days. Their luck finally seemed to be changing: The afternoon they arrived the sun came out — and so did the snakes. Joe and the other herpetologists immediately headed into the forest to search for reptiles.

Nobody alive knew more about kraits than Joe Slowinski did. One thing he knew was how tricky they can be to identify, for there are nonvenomous snakes that mimic them with amazing accuracy. Joe had recently discovered one such species and named it himself. Lycodon zawi, a wolf snake, imitates the krait's alternating black and white bands so closely that it's difficult to make a definite identification from a few feet away.

Another species, Dinodon septentrionalis, is a dead ringer for the krait. The nonvenomous Dinodon mimics the many-banded krait so uncannily well that even an experienced herpetologist might need a magnifying glass to tell them apart. The only way to be sure is to examine the snake's head, to see whether what is known as the loreal scale is present, just below the eye: a fleck scarcely bigger than a snowflake, a tiny pentagon of horny skin that tells the difference between a harmless, handsomely banded Dinodon and the lethal krait.

This classic example of mimicry evolved millions of years ago, when predators avoided snakes that resembled the venomous krait, giving them an edge for survival. Nature didn't give the Dinodon venom, but it got the next best thing: a resemblance to the deadly many-banded krait, which makes snake-eating predators shy off.

More interesting to Joe, however, were the snakes that he and the other herpetologists were still carefully logging as Bungarus multicinctus; the many-banded krait (a name coined in 1861 by Edward Blyth, a British zoologist in Calcutta) probably belonged to other species. In 2001, the consensus was that the scientific name Bungarus multicinctus comprised several different species of krait, which were still waiting to be collected and identified by a skilled herpetologist. Joe Slowinski thought he was just the man for the job.

One of the most telling documents of the expedition is a photograph of Joe standing in a patch of sunlight, wrangling a many-banded krait. The ostensible purpose of the photograph was to serve as an archival record of the specimen, but the shot also powerfully conveys Joe's confident mastery of the situation. The children of the village came out to gawk as the pale-skinned visitor, taller and stockier than the malnourished men who lived there, free-handled the dangerous serpent they called ngan taw kyar ("royal tiger snake") with cool bravado. Their parents hung back, looking over a twig fence, watching in astonishment as the krait twisted and wriggled in the stranger's expert hands. Joe was a brilliant biologist in his prime, but he took a visceral, almost rapturous delight in handling snakes. This pleasure shines through in the photograph, captured in a glorious interlude of sun: The light gleams on Joe's mop of tawny hair and goatee, glinting penny-bright.

At thirty-eight, Joe's life was riding a dizzying upward arc. Four years earlier, he'd been toiling in a dead-end job as a lecturer at a small university in Louisiana; now he was among the most respected and influential herpetologists in America. A few days before Joe left San Francisco for the expedition, the National Science Foundation had awarded him a grant for $2.4 million-the largest public research grant the California Academy of Sciences had received in its 148-year history. By year's end, he would take over the chairmanship of the herpetology department at the Academy, the premier natural-history museum in the American West. And Joe was in love-unexpectedly and passionately in love-with a beautiful woman he'd recently met in San Francisco. With the toad middle age squatting in the middle of his path, leering, he was thinking of settling down. In Burma, Joe dreamed of Sandy.

That evening, the group received bad news. Runners from the next village on the expedition's route arrived in Rat Baw, reporting that mudslides had closed roads, and floods had washed out bridges on the trail ahead. Joe had planned to press on soon into the Himalayas, even more remote terrain; now it appeared that the journey onward would almost certainly have to be canceled.

Yet the next morning Joe rose early and bounded out of his sleeping bag into the gray mist of first light. He found his Burmese assistant already hard at work on the porch, attempting to bring some order to the specimens collected the day before. The snakes were in cloth bags, lined up on the assistant's worktable. Every now and then, one of the bags would wiggle and thump.

Joe asked about a particular specimen, and the assistant handed it to him, saying that he thought it was a Dinodon.

Although it was still too dark to see well, Joe absentmindedly thrust his right hand into the sack to extract the specimen and have a look. Immediately, he winced with pain and yanked out his hand. A tiny black-and-white banded snake, less than ten inches long, was dangling limply from his middle finger, its fangs still sunk into his flesh.

Joe looked at it in quiet horror. Without the hope of a doubt, he said, "That's a [expletive] krait."

Chapter Two
The Snake Charmer

Black Rat Snake
Elaphe obsolete

The black rat snake, which inhabits the eastern United States from New England to Oklahoma, is a large, powerful constrictor and excellent climber. The animals' shed skins are often found draped in the rafters of barns and abandoned buildings. They can climb trees up to forty feet high; with their cryptic black coloration, they become invisible against tree bark or at rest on the forest floor. The species is nonvenomous, and feeds on mice, chipmunks, voles, shrews-even squirrels and baby birds. Black rat snakes are sociable hibernators, sharing their rocky crevice retreats with many other snake species, including timber rattlesnakes, racers, and bull snakes. If threatened, they may vibrate their tails, producing a rattling sound, which sometimes causes the species to be killed by frightened people who mistake them for rattlesnakes.

Joe Slowinski's connection with the animal world was always intense, immediate, and electric. And he discovered it all by himself.

It began in the summer of 1968, in Wisconsin. Joe was five years old. His father, Ronald Slowinski, an artist and professor of painting at the Kansas City Art Institute, was appointed to a summer residency at the Peninsula Art School in a small town called Fish Creek, near Green Bay. The Slowinskis-Ron and his wife, Martha, Joe, and his baby sister, Rachel-were housed in a cabin made of hand-hewn logs, which had aged to a silvery russet.

Bucolic Door County, Wisconsin, was the perfect place for a curious boy to start his exploration of the natural world. One day, Joe found a butterfly chrysalis in the milkweed near the cabin. It was an exquisite thing, a pale aquamarine lozenge pranked with spots that gleamed like drops of pure gold. No one was sure exactly what it was, but Martha found a glass jar for it, and Joe punched airholes in the lid. A couple of days later the chrysalis turned dark, and the next morning, while Joe and his mother were watching, a monarch butterfly emerged. When Joe opened the jar, the butterfly crawled to freedom, shook out its delicate wings, and flew away. Martha said, "It was enough to make a naturalist of anyone."

It was an idyllic summer. During the days, Joe and Rachel stayed at a day-care center in a farmhouse nearby, watched over by some young mothers from the neighborhood, while their parents made art. Ron painted his big geometric abstractions in the nobly proportioned stone barn provided for him as a studio. Martha, a figurative painter, worked there too, but she also loved to draw outdoors, sketching the gnarled apple trees in the abandoned orchard that surrounded the barn. Their bare, twisted branches reminded her of Van Gogh.

One sunny morning, this tranquil scene was shattered by hysterical screams emanating from the day-care center. Ron, in his studio, and Martha, sketching outside, both heard them. Dropping paintbrush and charcoal, the young parents ran toward their children on converging paths through the tall weeds that fringed the orchard. They found Joe surrounded by a knot of distraught adults, enjoying himself enormously as he brandished a writhing black snake over his head-a snake longer than he was, and as thick as his own little arm.

Perhaps some adult had told Joe that big black snakes like that weren't dangerous. More likely, it never occurred to him to be afraid: It just wasn't in his nature. He was entranced by the strength and strange beauty of the animal, a living creature with a will of its own, now subjugated to him-and as happy and pleased with himself as a little boy can be who has given the grown-ups a good scare.
By the time Ron and Martha got there, some local men had arrived who recognized that it was a harmless rat snake. Joe was ordered to turn the snake loose and scolded for his naughtiness, but halfheartedly: Everyone was relieved that no harm had been done.

Throughout his life, Joe never met an animal he feared. His father would later say, "Joe always thought of himself as a critter, not a person."

The black rat snake is one of the nearly three thousand species belonging to the suborder Serpentes. Although the rational system of classifying earthly life forms, known as taxonomy, is far more complex now than when its elements were codified in the eighteenth century, nearly all snakes are still classified as belonging to one of three families.

Most species usually described as nonvenomous, like the black rat snake, are grouped together as the Colubridae. Joe Slowinski was coauthor of a paper published in 2005 that described this taxon, or category of related life forms, with a concision unusual in the scientific literature: "The family Colubridae is the most diverse, widespread, and species-rich family within all of Serpentes, occupying all continents except Antarctica and consisting of greater than 1,800 species." Thus the colubrids actually account for a majority of all known snakes. Dinodon septentrionalis is a colubrid, as are common garter snakes.

Most dangerously venomous snakes, on the other hand, fall into one of two families: the Viperidae, comprising vipers such as copperheads, rattlesnakes, and the deadly Russell's viper of Asia; or the Elapidae, distinguished by having permanently erect fangs fixed in the front of the jaw, which include the cobras and kraits of Asia, most of the snakes of Australia, and the coral snakes of the Americas.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Snake Charmer by Jamie James Copyright © 2008 by Jamie James. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/books/chapters/chapter-snake-charmer.html

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