99% Invisible - 437- Science Vs Snakes

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

More than 100,000 people die every year from snake bites. Snake venom can have up to 200 different toxins inside it and each toxin has a different horrible effect to your body. Some attack your muscles, while others attack your nerves. And sometimes two different toxins can work together to form an even more sinister combination. Part of the reason people are dying is because they're not getting antivenom - the medicine required to fight these horrible toxins - fast enough. The system we have to create snake antivenom is a time-consuming and inefficient process that basically hasn't changed for more than 100 years. This is a collaboration with the great podcast Science Vs from Gimlet Science Vs Snakes

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Pete Bethune is a conservationist, and while that job title doesn't sound exciting, he's basically G.I. Joe, but for nature. He's stopped whalers and in the Pacific Ocean, he rescued a dolphin, held captive in an Indonesian resort. Oh yeah, and he's been stabbed twice.

That's the host of Science Versus, Wendy Zookerman, who I'm pretty sure has only been stabbed once. And recently, Pete's work brought him to Costa Rica, and that's where his luck almost ran out. This was just before Christmas. Pete was deep in the rainforest with his team, and they were looking for evidence of illegal logging and hunting. Picture it.

It's a lush forest, thick canopy, very hilly. But it's up and down, up and down, up and down. Really steep. It's got the most ferocious ants on earth, it's got poisonous spiders. They are all over the place and a lot of the trees have very spiky trunks on them, so you need to be really careful walking. That's pee. And while he was walking very carefully through the rainforest, something got him. I just felt this bang in the back of my leg and my first thought was someone that hit me. Like it felt like someone had a big sticker, a piece of wood in it, wet the back of my calf.

Then I looked down and then how I see this snake sort of recoiling away from me with its sort of head and it was sticking about two feet off the ground. And as soon as I saw it like like I knew it was a food lunch. The Fertilance or spearhead is the most deadly snake in Central America. Right away, Pete's colleague grabbed his cell phone. He had one bar of reception

and called up emergency services. They didn't make it clear. You need to get their guide or hospital as quickly as possible or he is gonna die. Pete had maybe six hours to get to a hospital. And to get their guide or hospital as quickly as possible or he is going to die. Pete had maybe six hours to get to a hospital. And to get there, he had to dodge all the spikes and spiders and other snakes in the rainforest. Pete had two options. He could go up on the ridge of the mountain, which would use up his six hours. All he could go down through

muddy creeks. That would be harder but also faster and he might get to the hospital in time. I remember looking at my map on my phone and thinking, you know, the only option here is we need to go down one of these creek beds. So I'm crawling on my ass, crawling down these little waterfalls, escartments, banks.

But as we're going down, I'm getting weaker and weaker, and the strobing now has moved all the way up to my groin area and eventually gets a stage where I just want to sleep, but I did think I'm not going to make this. My number was up. After trudging his way through waterfalls in mud, Peter arrived at the edge of the rainforest and onto a beach where he saw the coast guard. They lay me down on the ground and I'm just closing my eyes and you know, just hang on a little bit more, hang on a little bit more. He'd arrived at the hospital around three and a half hours after he was bitten.

His heart was racing and he passed out. When he came to, he started documenting everything that was going on. Good morning. Good afternoon, the patient we are in the world. So if you guys are uptight or not, what's happened over the last couple of days? By the time he got to the hospital, the snake venom had begun to destroy his muscles

and blood vessels. Pete's leg had ballooned to double its size. And something else had happened. A warning. We're about to talk about genitals. My b****** and b****** go all big and black. It is not an uncommon thing that happens with snake bite victims. That doesn't mean it's not quite a shock.

Oh, I remember I asked her on the news. It's like, is this normal bug? And she can moment you just say. Yeah, kind of, maybe. To turn things around, the doctors had injected Pete with snake antivenom. It raced through his body, fighting back against the toxins. And quickly, it was clear that it had worked. Pete was going to be okay, and by day 11, he was up and about. Feeling a lot better today?

So I've started walking around for the first time I've walked. And if you didn't get anti-bannum, what would have happened? Oh, if I didn't get anti-bannum, I would have died. No question. So yeah, I was pretty lucky, eh? Well, that is a dramatic story, Wendy. But why are you telling us about it? So I really want to zoom into the part of the story where he gets that treatment, that

stuff that saved his life. That's the anti-vendom. That neutralizes the toxins. Exactly. The anti-vendom. So Pete got it and he survived. But many people around the world, they aren't so lucky. Some 100,000 people die every year from snake bites.

100,000. And you can bet that to sharks, they kill maybe about six people globally every year. And so part of the reason that people are dying from snake bites is because they're not getting antivenom fast enough. And this is for a bunch of reasons, but the one that I want to zoom in on is the way that we make anti-venom. Because the system we have now is this complicated time-consuming inefficient process that in many ways hasn't changed for more than a hundred years.

Okay, so then why is it so hard to make anti-venom? It all boils down to the thing that we're battling against. It's the stuff that we're trying to save ourselves from, the venom. It turns out that snake venom is truly nefarious. And I spoke to Christina Zedeneck, who studies snake venom at the University of Queensland in Australia about this.

And she kind of told me all the horrible ways that snake venom can kill you. It's like you're almost getting digested alive. So there's that. That sounds bad enough. Yeah. Where does it at the beginning? So snake venom can have up to 200 different toxins inside it.

And each of those toxins have sort of slightly different tasks. So some start attacking your muscles, others attack your nerves, and sometimes two different toxins can work together to really mess this up. You've got one toxin that's pretty bad on its own, and another one that's pretty bad on its own, but when you put them together and they like tag team against you. Whoa. Yeah. It's like suck eggs.

The suck eggs, indeed. I mean, look, that's from a scientist. So we'll wait to say. OK, so this is what she's talking about. This is how the snake better be saying suck eggs. You could have one toxin that is going through your body and making it difficult for your blood to clot. And then at the same time, another toxin

that is kind of making you bleed out, like it's punching holes in your blood vessels. You've got a hole caused by the toxins that's now open and you're spewing out red blood cells and plasma and platelets. But all of a sudden, you can't stop the bleeding in that area. Christina says that sometimes people can bleed from all over their body. Yeah, yeah.

So like your gums from your eyes, sometimes your ears or your sphincter, your butthole. Oh, geez. And even if it's really bad, there was a tie-pan by Nostraia where a guy was...it seemed like he was sweating blood from his back. Oh. And so with your body's inability to clot and prevent this internal bleeding, little bit by little bit, really becomes a serious problem pretty quick. So basically what this means is to make an antidote against snake venom,

we need to have something that can battle against that soup of toxins. And the thing is, you actually need different antivenoms for different snakes. So what saved Pete's life with the fertile land's anti-venom that wouldn't have worked if he'd gotten bit by, I don't know, a black mumble snake. And if you aren't Pete who can recognize fertile lands, you could be in real trouble then. I mean, you actually could and Pete took a photo of the snake. He knew it was a fertile land because he's beaten his GI Joe, but they took a photo and showed it to the doctors at the hospital. So what happens if you take the wrong antiventic

venom? It probably wouldn't work, like it wouldn't do anything. Bottom line, if they didn't have the fertile ants antiventic pep, then he probably would have died. Now to be clear, if you take the correct antiventic, it works and you know, this can save lives. So if you know the snake, and there's an antivenom for it, great. But you mentioned that making this antivenom is a complicated old process. What are you talking about there? Okay. Let me take you on a little journey of how we make antivenom today. It all starts with a kind of snake whisperer. Hello Wendy. So my name is Graving Corralis. Graving's worked with snakes for about a decade and he loves them,

but these snakes don't always love him. Several years ago a Sri Lankan green pit viper bit his pinky finger. When you look at your finger now, what does it look like? So I actually lose a little part of my finger, it's like one centimeter or less than it used to be. Oh wow. I like it. It's really nice for a scrunchie. You kind of got to have this attitude if you do what Graven does. He works at a lab in Costa Rica called the Clotomiro Picato Institute, and they make the anti-venom that saved Pete's life. Inside Graven's workplace, there are rows of boxes filled with snakes. So we have about 500 snakes.

What? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so to cook up anti-venom, first up, we need venom from a snake. So to make that stuff for pee, Graven had to go to a box with a fertile ants in it. We know, before we open the box, it's going to fight, because they are very explosive. They strike many times. Graven and his colleagues carefully take this riving angry snake out of the box, using wooden poles. Then they sedate the snake by popping it in a basket with carbon dioxide gas. When it goes under, when it's sedated, how long

do you have before it wakes up generally? Around five minutes. Five minutes. So what's going through your mind as you're doing this? I know it sounds kind of crazy, but nothing like in this moment, I have to be very focused. You're holding not just a snake, but your partner's life. In that moment, you cannot feel no fear. You have to be fearless. And then Graven picks up the snake's head while his colleague holds the snake's body. And then Graven milks the snake. What is, what is milking the snake in tail?

I'm so glad you asked. Let me get this photo for you. Okay. Oh my goodness. Okay. They're holding the snake and there's a metal object prying the mouth open and the fangs are popped out and they're bringing the snake's head to a jar to collect the venom. Yes. So this is Graven in the picture and you can see that his index finger

is kind of over the top of the snake's head. What he's going to be squishing down on is the venom gland of the snake, which is like this pouch, basically, that's filled with venom. So we have to do a little massage massage like a massage. Yeah. And I ask Grave to try and tell me what this feels like as someone who's never looked a snake. And he was like, he just couldn't tell me. He was like, it's like nothing you've ever felt before. And the closest thing he got was he was like, it's a bit like if you imagine a slice of

an orange under snake skin. And you're kind of like squishing the orange. Okay. And then the juice comes out of the snake fangs. I see. I say, so it's a little tough. It's not like squishy. It had some resistance, but you push it on the back of the head and it pushes out a little bit of venom. Yes. Wow. Yeah. And Graven says that he can get around a teaspoon of venom from one fertile ant snake. Okay, so now he's massaged the venom out of this snake into a jar. What happens to the venom then? Okay, here's where it gets kind of ridiculous because now... Here's where? Okay. All right. I was waiting for it to get ridiculous. Because now, here's where? Okay.

All right. I was waiting for it to get ridiculous. Well, because he is what we need a second group of animals. Oh, goodness. Okay. And we're going to call him the cavalry, because we literally need a file of horses. Whoa. Okay.

This is a turn. So, perhaps do you shake, but basically we need a large animal, for reasons that we'll become clear later. But at the center where Pete's anti-venom was made, there's about 120 horses. And there's also this guy, Jose Maria Gutiores. They're really fantastic animals. Do they have names? Yes, they have names.

In fact, there was one horse one time with my name, so I was very proud of that. Jose Maria is a professor at the Clotter Mito Piccato Institute. Alright, so they're using all these horses because the anti-venom is actually going to be created inside the horse's body. And here's how. So, Chris and Maria's team will take that venom that Graven cooked out of the snake. And then you inject little

amounts of venom into horses. And when when a horse is first injected with say a tiny amount of venom, how did they react to the they like, no, do you think it would be like like a mosquito bite? I think it would be a little more than that because we are injecting a toxic substance. So does this hurt the horse? Well, we don't know for sure, because the horse doesn't talk. Human speak.

But from what we can tell, there's a little bit of swelling around where they do the injection, nothing too serious though. And they're just injecting tiny, tiny amounts. And what's gonna happen next is that the horse is gonna be injected with venom every two weeks or so. And what they're doing is actually waiting for the horse's immune system to start building up

antibodies against the venom. That's what we're here to harness. That is actually the anti-venom. Another way to think about it is that you're kind of vaccinating the horses against the venom. And then after several of these injections, usually a couple of months, for instance, at that point the horses are bled. They take around six liters of blood, which sounds like a lot, but Jose Maria says it's kind of the horse equivalent of donating a bag of blood at a blood bank.

Okay, that's not so bad. You get a cookie, you get some orange juice, you're all right. You get a bunch of day. And this is actually why we need horses because they're these big animals that can donate a lot of blood. So after all this, we get the very thing that we've been waiting for this miraculous drug that can fend off that super complicated cocktail of venom the horse antibodies They're purified then freeze dried and put into a vial and that is the stuff that gets injected into people like Pete So this antibodies this horse antibodies would get into the bloodstream they find the toxins and then they block the action of the toxins.

And so even though we say antibodies as if it's like one thing, within that vial of antivenom, there could be 50 different antibodies that go after 50 different toxins in the blood. Exactly. Actually, it's a mixture of antibodies and their antibodies against each of the toxins. And we need horses for this because they're these big animals and they can donate a lot of blood. And horses actually have a similar enough immune system to us, so their antibodies work

for humans. Chrysé Maria reckons that each bag of horse blood gets you enough antivenom to treat around 15 people. I mean, it's a super cool process and fascinating, but it also seems just way too complicated. Yeah, and then just to add a tiny bit more complexity here is to make antivenom for all the venomous steaks in the world. You actually need to inject horses with the specific venom from all those snakes in the world. And

as all means we've got labs in Indonesia, in India, in Egypt, in South Africa, in Australia, that are just piled high with horses all getting injected with venom. And the thing is, we've basically made anti-venom the same way since the late 1800s. Wow, really nothing has changed in that time period. It's just the personnel and the horses, but it's the same process. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there have been some improvements, like in some cases, for example, the horses will go through this whole process, and instead of just being injected with one kind of venom, they'll be injected with three different kinds of venom.

So that means they'll make all these antibodies for then three different kinds of venom. I see. So it's like a little bit more efficient, but the process is still basically the same. Yes, I think that's fair. Yes. So I guess the obvious question is,

is we've been doing this for 100 plus years. Why are we still doing this way? Like why haven't we come up with a better way to do this? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think the dream for a lot of the people who work on this problem is to create a universal antivenom. So it's something that you could make in a lab and that could be used for heaps of different kinds of tanks for black numbers, for fertile answers, for rattlesnakes, and you wouldn't need to go through this whole process so many times in so many different countries. Well, it sounds super easy. Why don't we just do that? It's not easy and it takes a lot of time and innovative thinking and the big thing is money.

And for a long time, no one was really putting a lot of money into this space and that's for all kinds of complicated reasons. But if we had to boil it down to a word, I would say that word was capitalism. So as we talked about, snake bites kill around 100,000 people every year. This is a serious problem, but most of those deaths are happening in rural areas in Africa and Asia for people who can't afford a lot of money for medication. And drug companies haven't put a lot of funding into this to try and make things better, basically. But since 2017, things have started to change.

What happened in 2017? Well, the World Health Organization gave snakefights this special designation. They listed them as the most important kind of neglected tropical disease. This sounds terribly nerdy and in the weeds, but basically what it means for a disease is that it's kind of like winning in the oscar. You get extra attention, you get extra money. That is basically what's happened.

We've seen this real change in what's going on. You see more research in this space. And after more than a hundred years of making antivenom with the horses and the snakes, now there's all these new ideas on the horizon. And Jose Maria says that this has all been huge. Things have really changed. The world in general is paying much more attention

to this disease. And it's really exciting. And it's really exciting. So now that snake bites have gotten the amount of attention they deserve, where are we with the universal antivetham? We're starting to see some really exciting things in the science. So one of them is that at the same time as snake bites have gotten all this extra attention, scientists also developed these better tools to be able to look inside venom and analyze those toxins. And what we're realizing is that even though there are thousands of toxins doing slightly different things,

you can actually group them together into families of toxins and then try and tackle those families and it's a much easier target. You can think about it like this. Are you a basketball fan? Not especially, but we'll continue on. Excellent. A huge basketball fan in the corner here. All right, so this is kind of how I've been thinking about the way that they're tackling this universal anti-bed and problem. If you say you're in the NBA and you've got to play again, All right, so this is kind of how I've been thinking about the way that they're tackling this universal anti-bed and problem. If say you're in the NBA and you've got to play against hundreds of players in the league, one way to do that would be to try and figure out the defense

of all the individual players. You know, you carry LeBron and even all the middle-level players and all the ones on the bench, like even Bobon, you've got to work out what's going on with him. Well, of course, I mean, I think about Bobon all the time. But I guess contextually, I'm to assume that Bobon is not exactly a LeBron or a Curry. No, but he's doing his best. Okay, great. Exactly. So you've got to work out each player's individual tricks. Instead, what we're doing now is we're just looking at what the big, dangerous players

are doing and grouping them together and then working out a defense against them. So just focusing on Steph Curry and all the Curry copycats out there. Okay, that makes sense. So if you know that the toxin hits a lot of three pointers, you're basically like making a medicine to deal with that particular attack. It's the anti-three pointer medicine. Exactly. Exactly.

And so has this approach been working so far? You know, it's been going well. So for example, there's this big family of enzymes that are swimming inside venom and what they do is damage blood vessels. And they're called metallic protonazers. And they're found in viper's all around the world. And so scientists have now been searching for a way to basically stop metallic protonazers

from working. This is one of those scientists. Go on, introduce yourself. Yeah, so I'm Laura Alblastcu. I work at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. And scientists like Laura are trying to figure out how to protect us against that big family of nasty enzymes. And to do that, she's been thinking, well, what do the enzymes need to survive?

And they've discovered that one of the things these enzymes need is zinc. And Laura says there's actually already a drug on the market that messes with zinc. So Laura and her team took this drug and then combined it with another drug. And then they enlisted some heroic little white mice and injected them with some snake venom from some of the most dangerous snakes in the world. We are looking at vipers from Africa, from India, from Central America. They waited a bit to let the venom set in, then gave them the concoction, the two drugs. Now, if this didn't work, most likely. These mice would all die within a four-hour window.

But instead, the team saw something different. The mice started moving around, sniffing, they seemed to be recovering. These animals are still alive and look healthy. And how are you feeling? Yeah, I was feeling great. I didn't expect it to work so well against animals that are so different from each other. Yeah, to work for a fertile ants from Central America

and then an Asian, you had sore scaled viper. Yeah, to work for a fertile ants from Central America and then an Asian, you had sore scaled viper. Yeah. How big is that in the world of Antivenom? This is amazing. It's really great. It's really important. So they have it after a hundred years of needing to inject horses with all these different kinds of venom. Laura's drug has worked. We did it, Roman! I'm a feeling that we did not do it. That's not how science works.

One clinical test doesn't do it. No. And actually one of the mice did die 18 hours later. But, but, but, but, this tactic is actually showing so much promise that there's already a clinical trial in humans underway that's focusing on another drug that messes with zinc. That's great, and this is a completely different approach. I mean, using drugs rather than using antibodies from another animal is like, it's completely novel.

No, exactly. I mean, it's novel in the world of snake bites, but it's what we do for basically every other disease out there. And you know, the antivenom that we have now, it does work when you can get it. And so scientists are thinking that maybe in the shortage term, we might have these new and exciting treatments that kind of work alongside the antivenom from the horses. It's funny because like,

you know, we've spent a year with COVID-19 and we saw a series of vaccines go from design to trial to approval in under a year. And that's not how science normally works ever. Usually it's a process where you try things, lots of mice die, and after years of experiments, I mean, maybe we have a small breakthrough. Yeah, I mean, I think the COVID-19 story, it could tell us two things and Tom will tell. Like, perhaps this virus was actually surprisingly easy to make a vaccine for.

And we were kind of lucky and a nasty a virus could have come around that we couldn't have had a vaccine for. But maybe the other lesson here is that if scientists get bucket loads of money and basically you encourage nerds from all around the world to tackle a problem, that they could solve it very quickly. Yeah, yeah. It's like a Manhattan Project or, you know, sending a person to the moon, you know, it's just like, if you put enough money and will behind it, you can make it happen.

Exactly. Exactly. And so maybe that will happen with snake anti-vendom too, if enough scientists and there's enough excitement around this area. Okay, so I've one more question before we go. Like, what happened to Pete? You know, he got bit by this snake. He nearly died. Is he still traipsing around as this conservationist, Gio Joe. Yes, there's no change in Pete Watts, however. He is still in Costa Rica. He's going to be patrolling the jogger's suit. And he said his leg is doing all right. In the meantime, he actually still

holds a little place in his heart for the snake that got him. I'm happy that Guy is still alive and up there. So you don't hold the grudge against the snakey? No, I'm happy that Gaur is still alive and up there. So you don't hold the grudge against the snakey? No, I don't hold a grudge against the snake. He was just doing snake things. He does a good attitude. Thank you Wendy. Thanks Robert. More strange fascinating snake content with Wendy's Sookerman. After this. So I'm back with Wendy's Sookerman from Science versus Wendy.

Let us talk more about snakes. Yes, please. So as I've been researching this episode, I realized there were all these things about snakes that I had never thought about before. Like they're quite beautiful. They have all these different colors on their scales. And I also realized how little science knows about some, what I would have thought were pretty basic snake things. I also realized how little science knows about some,

what I would have thought were pretty basic snake things. Like, for example. Like, scientists still aren't sure if snakes can hear. Like hear it all? Yeah, yeah. So, Dr. Christine Isidanec, who we heard from in the first half of the show, she's like, you know, we know snakes can feel vibrations.

That's what we're taught. I don't know if. I actually don't know if you're taught this in them. But every Australian knows that if you exceed a snake, you've got to stamp your feet to try and get them to feel. Okay, so we know snakes can feel vibrations, but we didn't know whether they could hear sounds through the air. And a big reason for that is that they don't have external ears. Which ever since she told me that I just can't stop imagining it with external ears. I mean, that is the only way we'd really know is if they had big old ears. You're right. I'm not on their side of their hands. And so, so because they don't have this, you know, for a long time subscibe, just like, well, we just don't think they can hear. And then Christina heard this kind of a basic story

for one of her colleagues, Damien Kendu. So, and I want to tell you, it's, I mean, in some ways, it's like, I can't, I can't imagine a more stereotypical Australian story. So I am nervous to bring this to more Americans, but you're in a safe space here. Thank you. Thank you. So this guy, he sometimes makes the sound effects to more Americans, but... That you're in a safe space here. Thank you. Thank you.

So this guy, he sometimes makes the sound effects for films and he noticed that while he was working on what he called low-end frequencies, so think like bombs exploding, you know, that like, pooh, and like earthquakes where you hear those tremors in a cinema. Yeah. And so while he was creating those sounds, he would notice that brown snakes would start slithering next to his house.

From seemingly nowhere. He didn't know why it could have been a coincidence. It could have been that they were feeling vibrations or maybe because they really could hear the sound waves through the air. And so he ends up telling the story to Christina. And Christina was like, yeah, you know, there are a few studies suggesting like maybe snakes can hear, you know, still this huge debate. And so just this year, they teamed up and decided to test it.

We've got a soundproof room and we've got 19 catch of snakes. What her team does is they take the snake out of its holding container, which is essentially like a rubbish bin with some holes in the lid. Grabbing the snake with a hook and then with his hand when it's safe. And then they put the snake into this soundproof room. We've got a half-ball, which we've just secured the door for, for security. Christina sent me a photo. It's literally fancier than the Gimlett studios. And definitely more secure. And then they give this snake some time to settle. So then they play some sounds

through this very special setup they have that's basically designed so that the sounds come through the air and they don't make vibrations on the floor. I see, right. And then she's basically recording the snake's behavior. Just started the sound. She dropped her lower jaw, which is quite interesting, a defensive pose. And now she's flicking her tongue and slightly moving around, head raised off the ground, peering into the distance, still

flicking the tongue, not making any large movements. So what did they find? Do snakes actually hear the sound? Okay, she's still analyzing the data, but he is what she told me about it. There's some very interesting behaviors. I think it will be clear at least with some of the individuals that they're absolutely going to be aware of the sound. What I think is pretty cool with what Christina is starting to see is that

the behavior she's seeing is really dependent on the individual snake, right? And so here's what she said about that. How they respond, I think, it seems to be based on the individual personality, whether they're a type of a timid snake or whether they're sort of more defensive and willing to give more defensive behaviors and by that and a snake would be dropping their lower jaw to show their fangs or hissing. Do you think about snakes as having personalities? Yes, we see it all the time.

So my husband and I, we have 24 snakes as pets. And so we see it on a very intimate level. One snake doesn't like to be touched, another one could care less. One basically like falls asleep in your hands. He's like, this old man. He's literally 21 years old. He's like, you know, 2.2 meter coast of Taipei, like they're very sort of predictable in their personalities. And so to take this back to the experiment, so in the tape where we were hearing about the experiment, Christina's describing the snake, the tissing,

and getting all pissy at the sound, that's a coastal type-an. But it's not this sleepy guy that she's talking about, she is. That sleepy guy was also in the experiment, and she said that he basically fell asleep when he heard the sounds. So this is perfect example of how she's seen these different reactions. By the way, just to get a sense of how big that sleepy snake is, she said 2.2 meters.

It's about the same height as Bobon, the basketball player. It all comes back to Bobon. That's fantastic. Right, did you ever think of snakes as having personalities? I mean, I had a snake, and I didn't have a lot of exposure. That one seemed to have a personality. It was named Tupac. I was corn snake, but like I didn't have a lot of other snakes to compare it to. So it had personality, but I didn't realize how, you know, maybe different. It was from other corn snakes. But, you know, Chui was a great snake

and would escape on occasion and then show up four days later, like right next to the cage. Oh wow, like a cat, like cats do that. Exactly, yeah. So it doesn't surprise me that they have some personality, the fact that one would get really exercised upon watching a Chris

for Nolan movie, another one would be completely nonplussed by it. It isn't like, it's new to me though. That's fantastic. And you to science, I think. I like it. Thank you. Thanks.

A version of this episode can be heard on the wonderful podcast Science vs. a production of Gimlett, a Spotify company. I'm a huge science vs. fan. I've been a fan since the very first episode that I heard when they were just a little Australian show. And now they're this big global phenomenon. I'm so excited we had this chance to work with them. Special thanks this week to Wendy Zookerman and the whole team at Science Versus,

including Blithe Terrell, Rose from Lur, Merrill Horn, Nick Del Rose, Michelle Dang, and Taylor White. Also special thanks to Maxwell Simian, a gimlet. 99% invisible was produced this week by Chris Baroube, music by our director of Sound Sean Riel, sound mix by Bryson Barnes,, music by our director of Sound Sean Riel, sound mix by Bryson Barnes, fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colestead is the digital director, Thrasadin,

includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Le, Christopher Johnson, Abby Medon, Katie Mingle, Sophia Glasgow, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW and San Francisco improduced on Radio Ro, which is scattered across the continent right now, but will always be centered in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We're a founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artist own podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.

You can tweet me at Ron Mars on the show at 9-9-PI-org or on Instagram and read it too. And you can find our home on the internet at 9-9-PI-dot-org. Radio Tapio. From PRX. you