The mere suggestion of this creature strikes fear into the hearts of many.
Legendary serpent.
Stealthy predator.
This king of the rattlesnakes won his reputation for good reason.
In truth, his world is one full of danger,
one that we know little about.
Look at that!
One man has set out to change that and nearly dies doing it.
Dr. Bruce Means ventures through the inland waterways
that went from Georgia through Florida's panhandle.
A freelance scientist, he is often on his own and prefers it that way.
For 25 years now, Means has pioneered
the study of North America's largest and most feared viper.
Means journeys into this personal heart of darkness on a mission.
He fears for the fate of the venomous snake he is after,
the Eastern diamondback rattler,
a proud and complex recluse slithering toward the black hole of extinction.
For over 50 years, I've wondered in nature by myself,
sometimes barefooted, but usually with just my sandals on.
Where I'm heading takes some getting used to.
There's marsh and muck, but on the other side
there's this paradise where the longleaf pine forest grows
and this special creature I love so much survives.
Diamondbacks are almost impossible to find.
Sometimes in the summer, though,
you can use the gopher tortoise for a guide.
Pregnant snakes often make their temporary homes
in the long burrows that the turtle digs.
So if you find a tortoise, he can sometimes lead you to a diamondback.
There! There's the gopher tortoise about two feet down.
The gopher tortoise shovels out his own burrow,
creating a home for hundreds of other creatures large and small.
There's another gopher of sorts, the gopher frog.
The Florida mouse and its pups.
And something we've been searching for, something menacing.
Incredibly, this is also the home of the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake.
A serpent scaled in diamonds,
it is among the most highly evolved of all snakes,
among the most dangerous,
and among the most unlikely roommate any tortoise ever had.
The perfect odd couple.
Diamondbacks only prey on warmblooded animals,
so the coldblooded tortoise is safe from the snake.
Still, the snake is not harmless and the tortoise is not taking any chances.
The Eastern diamondback rattlesnake is as American as the bald eagle.
It is the largest rattlesnake in the world.
This is a singular serpent.
Many snakes swim, but few take to surfing like this rattler.
It seems as at home at sea as it is on land.
It is the king of American snakes more forbidding,
almost invisible and utterly silent, but for its warning.
Its signature, the menacing rattle, signalling the nearness of sudden death.
The snake's trademark is made up of scales
left behind each time the snake sheds its skin.
They scratch together when shaken.
Amazingly, the frequency is the same as an ambulance siren.
The rattle evolved in the ancient dance of survival.
Twelve thousand years ago,
a menagerie of strange animals roamed the Atlantic Coast
mastodons, lamas and bison,
like this one, were as plentiful as deer.
All are gone now from the region
but for this survivor, the Eastern diamondback.
Having melted into his environment through camouflage,
the viper may have evolved a signal to spook off these big mammals.
Instead of being trampled, the snake rattled out a warningdon't tread on me.
Like the snake, Means prefers to be left alone.
So often, it's just the doctor and the diamondback,
man on snake, and sometimes snake on man.
I had hoped to be one of the few herpetologists
who studied venomous animals
and to say at the end of a career that I had never been bitten.
Means didn't get his wish.
He suffered his first bite in a laboratory accident
more than two decades ago.
Then a few years later, he paddled out to a distant and deserted barrier island
off the Florida coast to take a wildlife inventory.
The hazards of meeting up with a killer snake
were the furthest thing from his mind.
I was wandering through the dune of vegetation
and I encountered a rattle snake
about a threeandahalffoot, beautiful looking female.
Had my camera, so I start taking photographs.
The snake wanted to start fleeing and I grabbed it by the tail
and threw it up into the open, and it coiled up,
so I got more photographs.
And at that point, I should have been satisfied,
but for some crazy reason, and I'll never know why,
I decided I wanted to capture the snake.
I got in front of the snake, and I'm trying to pin the head of the snake
when it struck at me and I misjudged how far the snake could strike.
It could strike further than I realized.
And it, one fang got me on the forefinger.
I looked at my forefinger and there was a pinprick of blood there,
just beginning, a little jewel of red.
I thought to myself, "I cannot believe I let this happen.
When he was bitten in the safety of his lab,
he collapsed in just four minutes, his legs rubbery and useless.
Now, he faced a halfmile trek back to his canoe.
He had no communications and no choice.
The scientist in him understood that with every step he took,
his chances at survival dimmed,
because the long march pumped the venom faster through his body.
And he knew from his last experience that the legs go first.
The entire time it took me to get myself to safety,
there was one thing that overwhelmingly occupied the whole episode:
I kept thinking, "You're gonna do it.
Don't let this fear get you. Don't panic. Keep going."
And I set my teeth, I mean, I literally clenched my teeth,
and I said, "I'm gonna do it."
As the pain spread, the paralysis set in,
and he still had to paddle nearly a mile across the channel
separating him from the mainland.
Almost 30 minutes had passed.
Means knew from experience time was running out.
I had many thoughts of my life passing, you know, before me,
and most of all I worried about my children and my wife,
about what they would think if I would not make it.
And worst of all, here I was in a canoe,
and suppose that I panicked in the middle of the water and drowned
and disappeared and they'd never have known what had happened to me.
So I kept that thing in mind, "I'm gonna make it.
I'm gonna make it."
And I get all the way to shore.
So when I got on the shore, I tried to get out of the boat,
I couldn't move my legs.
I was totally paralyzed from the hips down.
I just threw myself over in the boat into the water.
My stuff dumps out into the water.
I pull myself out of the boat, and didn't bother with it;
it floated off a ways from me.
And I literally clawed my way to my car.
When I got to the car, I had a problem getting the key in the door,
and my car happened to have an idiosyncracy about opening up,
but fortunately it opened for me.
I dragged myself up into the car, pulled myself onto the seat.
Then I found out I couldn't drive. It's a stick shift.
So I had to grab my right leg, pull it in, put it on the accelerator,
grab my left leg, pull it in on the clutch.
I pushed the clutch in, started the car, gave it some gas.
And I was able to twist and pull it down and I popped the clutch.
I kept it in first gear and I tore off down the road towards help
not being able to shift, so I was in first gear,
going, "Rrrrrr," down the road.
The few minutes it took to drive to Survey Headquarters
were an endless nightmare.
All I could do is just turn the key off and let it,
"Chugchugchug" to a stop, open the door.
And then I had to let myself down onto the pavement.
The pain was like salt poured in an open wound,
and worse, he was growing weaker and weaker.
No longer able to drag himself over the hot knobby pavement,
he had to roll in order to move, but he couldn't roll in a straight line.
So he plotted a circle across the burning parking lot to his last,
best chance for survival.
Means reached his destination only to discover that his ordeal had just begun.
Nearly an hour had passed
since the rattler sank its fangs in Bruce Means's hand,
and now the scientist was discovering that the cure was as bad as the bite.
Twentysix vials of antivenin were pumped into his veins
to stem the tide of the snake's poison.
But the medicine proved an even more lethal toxin,
because Means was allergic to it.
People around me could see the twitching that goes on
a thing called muscular fasciculation.
The hair follicles around the mouth
and I'm fully bearded move in a circular motion.
My whole face was involved in these strange rhythmical movements of the skin,
which are characteristic of Eastern diamondback snake bites.
He spent ten days hovering between recovery and death,
often in intensive care, as his body rebelled against the antivenin.
But he survived.
And less than 24 hours after he left the hospital,
he was back at work, back to the snakes that nearly killed him.
What is the allure?
Why is Means willing to risk the snake's fatal attraction?
You know, this is a magnificent creature.
It's at the pinnacle of evolution and we know so little about it.
Apart from its beauty and its mystery, it has a rightful place in nature.
And now, it's at risk.
It's actually a very benign creature.
It likes to lie coiled up and hidden waiting for food and,
once in a rare while, for a mate.
The survival of the Eastern diamondback depends on bogs like this
and on these dwindling stands of longleaf pines,
a once vast torrent of forest that tumbled south
and west from Virginia to Texas.
These lofty but threatened woodlands sustain an immense web of wildlife
and are the keystone to the Eastern diamondback's survival.
The powerful connection between the pines and the diamondbacks
was little understood when Bruce Means arrived in Florida's woodlands.
The snake was feared and hunted, but never studied.
More than 20 years ago,
Means pioneered the use of radio signals
to track the Eastern diamondback's behavior.
He carefully introduced a harmless, mousesized transmitter
into the sedated snakes, which beamed their whereabouts.
In summer, he combs the forests for his latest subject.
At this point, sometimes I get so close that I can't see them.
They're camouflaged very well in the grass.
I have to be very careful I don't step on one.
Ah, there it is. Whew! A big one.
Little head. Whoa! Big body.
Hello? Who are you?
Whoa, is he heavy. Look at the size. Oh!
This is a big snake, but it's not nearly as big as rattlesnakes
get the Eastern diamondback.
This guy is about four and a half feet long and I would estimate
about five and a half to six pounds in weight.
They come a lot bigger.
A ten pound snake, is not uncommon, which would be almost twice his bulk.
And I've known of 12 and 13pound snakes.
The next thing I need to do is be sure that I don't endanger myself
and also that I am careful not to cause him to hurt himself,
so I'll partially narcotize him by putting an inhalant
and it'll take about five minutes for him to become totally placid.
I'm not going to put him entirely out.
And then we can work with him.
Let's see how he's doing. Yeah.
What is important here is I know he's under sufficiently
for me to work with him when he's lost his writhing response,
which you see him lying on his back now.
Now he's not out.
I have to be quite careful with him, anyway,
but he's probably out sufficiently for me to flip him over and then capture him.
Alright, notice he's not thrashing.
He would be doing that were he not somewhat groggy.
So the first thing I do is get a measurement
and he is 120 millimeters is now rattle length.
And his tailnow that rattling indicates he's not,
he's quickly coming out of his narcosis, but I have his head in my hand.
So it's 1200 millimeters in length and 120 tail,
that's about 10 percent of the body length, which is about right for a male.
Females have about 10 percent less tail length.
This is a young snake.
This animal may only be in his third year of life.
That's amazing.
A lot of people don't realize a snake that big could be a juvenile.
But this one's probably just sexually mature.
Could you imagine what one twice that size in volume would look like?
The Eastern diamondback
really represents the epitome of snake evolution.
And there are several reasons for that.
One is that it has this remarkable heatsensitive pit right there,
which is an advancement among snakes.
Another, of course, is this elaborate venom and fang apparatus.
The venom is a complex liqueur having several different proteins in it
8 to 10 and, depending on the species, more.
Each one of those proteins has various functions.
Many of them are enzymes.
They break down the tissue or in the case of the Eastern diamondback,
it actually has quite a bit of nerve attacking components in its venom.
So the initial use that the venom is put to is to immobilize its prey,
so it doesn't go too far away and the snake can go find it.
The snake employs its fierce weapons with surgical precision.
And it strikes with lightening speed.
Its jaws are lashed by sinew and powerful muscles
that snap open the fangs like a switchblade.
Sacks similar to salivary glands pump the venom
through hollow channels just like a hypodermic needle.
Though the bite is instantaneous, the snake pumps its venom several times
to force a lethal dose into its victim.
After locating its prey, the snake begins the laborious process of feeding.
And it always starts with the head.
First one half of the jaw,
then the other walk along the prey as it is ingested.
Small sharp teeth in the palate and lower jaw curve backward
sliding over the food, pulling it in.
The body moves forward like an accordion
as muscles in the throat draw the prey down.
A full grown snake could survive for a year
on three or four lunches like this one.
Though bitten and nearly killed by the Eastern diamondback,
Means says his research makes plain
the snake doesn't deserve its menacing reputation.
The Eastern diamondback rattlesnake is not a sinister animal.
A lot of people might think that.
They rely on several mechanisms to avoid your presence.
The first is camouflage.
There's a rattlesnake close by.
Normally you can't see the snake, becausewell, I know where it is
but he's hidden in the grass and they're very difficult to see,
so the rattlesnake is not rattling.
And they don't want to rattle
because they don't want to attract your attention.
Human beings will go over and kill it.
But watch what happens if I walk slowly towards the snake,
and it perceives that I'm aware of it, which it does now,
you can hear it rattling.
This snake doesn't have a huge rattle string, but he's beginning to rattle.
In fact, he's not rattling a lot.
This is a very complacent animal.
I might have to be a little more threatening.
You see that he's orienting to me, as I walk around him,
his head's turning.
Oh, this guy's quite complacent.
He can stick and reach me if he were to strike now.
Now if I back away from him,
he'll stop rattling, which he's done.
Generally, they rely on camouflage.
Interestingly, I touched the snake to stimulate it,
it did jump, but it still didn't strike me.
And it'll probably strike at this point.
Look at that. It did sort of lethargically as I passed it.
This is sort of the common, average behavior of the Eastern diamondback.
Some will strike, but in general most of them don't.
They're not the sinister animal that people think.
And they by no means chase people.
They don't go after you.
So how can you loathe an animal
that really doesn't have dirty deeds in its heart?
August is a brief but crucial passage for the Eastern diamondback.
Males are on the move now trailing the pheromones of females.
More than ever, the males are out in the open and exposed to danger.
The females are less restless during this time,
awaiting a mate or preparing to give birth near the safety of a burrow.
Birds of prey are the curse of the diamondback.
From the treetops, a redtailed hawk can spy a snake a half a mile away.
A pregnant diamondback, storing fat for the dozen young
maturing inside her body, would make for a feast.
Sensing danger overhead sends the tortoise
and the pregnant rattler down into the safety of the burrow.
The hawk is undaunted and the male is still in the open.
Its talons over fangs.
The hawk dances gingerly around its dangerous prey.
The victor shrouds its victim from intruders.
For this rattler, the mating game is over.
The gopher tortoise's well engineered burrow
is both a safe haven and a refuge.
The tunnel usually slopes some six feet underground,
but an ambitious turtle will tunnel 30 feet or more.
Over time, as many as 350 creatures may come and go as tenants here.
The gopher frog calls this hole in the ground home.
Like the tortoise, it's cold blooded and so it's safe from the diamondback.
The sheepishlooking gesture is really a reflex protecting its delicate eyes.
The barging gopher tortoise leaves no doubt who is landlord of this burrow.
He bulldozes past the other tenants
who are preparing to head out into the night.
Though the turtle's tunnel is little more than a narrow hallway,
the warmblooded Florida Mouse
occupies a oneroom apartment dug into the wall.
It's tiny, keyholesized entryway keeps out the big diamondback.
Though coming and going is still a risk,
she and the snake tend to keep different hours.
The diamondback usually hunts by day and the Florida mouse is nocturnal.
In the warmest months,
the Eastern diamondback may stay out after hours, but not to hunt.
Instead, it will find a spot to curl up and wait out the night.
As the orange light of day parts the clouds,
the diamondback nestles motionless at the base of a tree.
Rattlers are ambush hunters, using patience, stillness and stealth.
A family of squirrels ventures out into the day,
unaware of the deadly interloper nearby.
The fleeing squirrel has moments to live.
No matter where the squirrel dies, the snake will find it.
I know when I was bitten, my body fell apart.
As big as I am, I had a chance.
But for a small creature like the squirrel, it's all over in an instant.
How the snake tracks its wounded prey is not yet clear.
Means thinks a stricken animal gives off a special scent,
a unique signature that distinguishes it.
Food goes down headfirst, so the feet fold easily through the gaping jaws.
The diamondback gets its meal,
and there will be no more tales of alarm from this squirrel.
The diamondback brought a subtle advantage to its encounter
with the squirrel, a sixth sense, hunting through its heat sensing pits.
Means wants to understand the world as the snake perceives it.
The growing tip of the longleaf pine is warm.
That's interesting.
A pioneer in research, he has embarked on a new series of experiments.
He uses a thermal camera to reveal a world invisible to humans,
a world of heat radiating all around us.
Here is my imprint of my hand, right on the ground,
where you can see nothing but leaves with the naked eye.
It's absolutely different.
Now for an experiment, I have brought a cute little laboratory rat.
Good morning you cute little rat.
Are you ready to be a star?
We're gonna put him down on the ground
to see what he looks like through this infrared camera.
Alright, Mr. Rat, wander around.
Whoa! This is fantastic.
The thermal camera dramatically shows
how heat from the warmblooded mouse strips it of both cover and camouflage.
While no one knows what the snake actually perceives,
the camera offers visual evidence of the Eastern diamondback's advantage
in hunting warmblooded prey.
For the Eastern diamondback, heat is an allyand in surprising ways.
Lightning is as common to Florida as coastline,
and the bolts become firebrands setting the forest aflame.
The snake depends on these fires,
because they sustain the longleaf pine forest,
the diamondback's principal habitat.
Fire burns out underbrush, allowing for new growth.
The diamondback is well adapted to these fiery conditions
and seeks refuge from the flames.
This cotton mouth was not so lucky.
There are the quick and the dead and the well adapted.
After the fire, a mosaic of ash and old growth patch the earth.
A turtle navigates the embers trying to find food.
Within a few days, fresh greens will have punched through the ashes
and new palmetto sprays will have fanned out.
This is the miracle of the longleaf pine forest.
Here the role of fire is not to kill; it's to rejuvenate.
Even tortoises seem to sprout from the soil after a fire
newborns hungry for the green shoots.
August in the piney woods is a season of upheaval.
And the pregnant diamondback feels it most.
A month before labor she hunkers down,
feeding stops, movement stops for the most part.
Labor lasts 12 exhausting hours,
as she gives birth to a clutch of a dozen little diamondbacks.
Though the young are carried within her body and born live,
they hatch from sacks identical to eggs
but without the finishing touch the shell.
From the beginning, young rattlers can deliver a lethal dose of venom
and soon bear the first button of their baby rattle.
Conventional wisdom says snakes don't make good mothers.
But Means believes Eastern diamondbacks may.
The mother stays close to the clutch in the first crucial days of life,
although the reason may simply be exhaustion.
Deadly as the diamondback may be, they grow into a world of treachery.
Few survive their first year, for danger lurks in every direction
even from other snakes.
The kingsnake is known as a muscular hunter
a constrictor that kills by suffocating its prey.
Tongueflicks sample the air.
The diamondback senses a dangerous foe the kingsnake, dinner.
The kingsnake gets its name because it eats other snakes
and it's immune to its opponent's venom.
Pinning the diamondback in its corkscrew coils,
it crushes its victim, than swallows it whole.
It leaves the trophy till last.
More treacherous than the snake's natural predatorsthe commercial hunter.
While against the law, practices like this go on to this day.
Hunters are paid $10 a foot for diamondbacks, as much as $60 a snake.
Outwitted, the rattler is lured into betraying itself
with its last line of defense.
The hunter listens for the telltale rattle.
A spray of gasoline chokes the burrow.
The snake is desperate to escape the fumes
and abandons the sanctuary of the tunnel, winding up in a bucket.
The burrow that had harbored so much life may now become a wasteland.
No one knows how long the gas fumes may linger.
If the snakes are not killed outright,
many are brought to rattlesnake roundups,
which have been entertaining audiences for decades.
It's 39 years we've had this roundup.
It's a way of controlling the snakes down in this country.
And I don't really know if it has that much of an impact,
but we seem to get a lot of snakes every year.
Each year, Eastern diamondbacks are captured for roundups
that attract crowds as large as 25,000.
That's essentially a diamond there.
Yeah, we come up here for rattlesnake burgers.
They tell us they're really good.
Yeah, you know I had to say chicken. Chicken?
Then I said take the alligator too.
People want to cook them, kill them and wear them.
They even want their venom, which the roundups milk at bargain prices
for medical researchers.
Means attends roundups to take a head count of the rattlers,
trying to gauge the impact these events have on the Eastern diamondback.
The snakes are treated badly.
They're exploited for money,
then killed, with no thought for them as a renewable resource.
Worse than the roundup, says Means, is the skin trade.
Hides become fashion.
It is an ironic end for the Eastern diamondback,
the magical camouflage that had hid the snake so well
now calls attention to its wearer.
This is out of control and needs much more regulation.
Even alligators are licensed and tagged now.
But dead diamondbacks, they're treated as party favors.
Roundups give people the wrong message.
The truth is these snakes are not expendable, they're not evil.
People need to realize the value of what they're destroying.
This is already a snake hard pressed to survive.
But roundups and snake skin boots are just one threat.
Humans keep upping the ante on the snake's future,
and dangers are everywhere.
In the summer, hot highways become killing gauntlets or worse
burning barriers, cutting the snake off from its habitat.
Little more than two percent of the rattlers' ancient territory remains.
Humanity's pattern of destruction, the precious longleaf pinelands replaced
by regiments of future two by fours, plowed over by agriculture,
slashed apart by highways, and fragmented into withering islands,
the leftovers of development.
There may not be enough land left to the snake to sustain it,
let alone provide a future.
And as the snake goes, so go his neighbors.
What the diamondback needs is a better image,
more public relations, some fans.
One of the roundups in the Eastern United States has done a wonderful job
of this very sort of thing.
They don't even call it a roundup anymore,
because they do not roundup snakes.
It's called a festival.
And they are very frightened of people.
If you come across one, he'll usually coil up,
shake his tail, and back away from you.
And they put emphasis on environmental education.
They have just as many people that come to the festival.
They'll crawl down in there and live there
with the turtle and just stay there.
Every now and then something will spook a rabbit,
he'll run down the hole, he'll get a meal served to him like meal service.
These civic organizations that are involved in running the festival
in the communities generate just as much income as any of these roundups
that put the accent on beautization and misuse of the creatures.
It may be that it's already too late for the Eastern diamondback.
While well adapted to the trials of nature,
the torments of humans are pushing the rattler to its limit.
Means fears that before we fully understand the snake's role
in the environment, it may be gone.
But even he acknowledges that the snakes
have found some surprising ways to survive.
Florida's torrents flood the lowlands and tiny streams become channels.
Even the tortoise goes with the flow, if sometimes reluctantly.
The hazards of the deep abound.
Carried along on the stream,
the hardpressed animals take with them the future.
Means believes the snake's survival skills might help it endure.
Swimming makes it mobile.
Streams become highways, escape routes from the destruction
caused by development,
and these streams sometimes ferry snakes all the way out to sea.
The Eastern diamondback island hops.
It's been found way out as far as the The Dry Tortugas.
That's about 120 miles from the Florida Coast.
This could be the snake's salvation, but like everywhere else,
the islands are prime real estate for development.
Propelled far and fast beyond their normal range,
the diamondbacks become pilgrims protected by their isolation.
Where the snake's habitat is overrun by development,
the flood carries survivors to another, more welcoming place,
their distant island, though it may be full of fiddler crabs.
Still, on his own, Means scours the barrier islands,
studying the snakes in their remote habitats.
The Eastern diamondback is likely to be an endangered species very soon.
It has a special role in nature
and it won't take much for it to be lost forever.
The snake simply needs a place to live and the opportunity to survive.
Even after 25 years of research,
Means says his efforts remain a work in progress.
What's clear is that the snake plays an essential role in nature,
both as predator and prey.
Means's aim is to help us know this animal before it's too late.
It's my greatest wish that in my lifetime,
I'll still be able to come to places like this
and see the Eastern diamondback rattlesnake.
I hope that continues.
Bruce Means reminds us that the diamondback's rattle
may be more than a threat,
that it may have a deeper meaning, that nature is sending us a message,
"Don't tread on me."