Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Snake Island - The Crowded Home of the Deadly Golden Lancehead Viper

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Wes puts on his explorer hat for this episode to see whether Ilha da Queimada Grande, aka Snake Island, would be a good place for the guys to take a group of listeners on a trip. They then discuss what the best and worst movies islands are, and what the worst animal to be stuck on an island with would be. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep number to a good life sleep. Hello everybody, welcome again to Tooth and Claw podcast. We got our wildlife biologist Wesley Larson in the house.

What's happening, Wes? Oh, I'm in the Casa right now. I'm in the Brazilian house. You're in Brazil? I'm in Brazil. Yeah. Brazil. Getting one of those Brazilian bikini waxes, I assume?

Just getting waxed. This is the only place you can do that. Do you see that Jesus statue? No. haven't gone to see old Jesus yet but that's in Rio I'm not I'm not gonna be in Rio I'm just in I'm in San Paulo and then I I'm in the Pontanol for I you know really quick I'll just fill you guys in before you introduce yourselves I guess I went to the ponton all with a film crew that we're recording something for a really big conservation

organization that I'm really happy to be working with can't talk about it yet but I should be able to soon and then this upcoming week let's just say I'd say you all probably smell really nice. Yeah, sure. Well, that's not the conservation organization. That's the film create. Yeah. And then I am guiding for naturalist journeys this upcoming 10 days.

So back-to-back, pontinol trips for me. Naturalist means you're all nude. Yeah? Yeah, exactly. It's the only completely nude travel agency. And this is like a pilot program, just to test and see if that'll work out for us and the listeners to do it. together, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's been great so far. I've seen four different Jaguars, a lot of cool birds. Were they doing anything? The Jaguars? Yeah. Yeah, there's

one that was like actively hunting came in. The other ones were pretty much just laying around. Oh, I did have one too where some giant river otters swam up and got really angry at it and it like laid down in the bushes and got all mad at them. That was cool. That's kind of fun. Yeah. I wonder what, wonder what he was doing. I don't know. It was a girl. I don't know what she was doing. I don't know what she was doing.

Some nimbie otters, not in my backyard. Sending mean tweets about otters or something. Yeah, could be. Probably not any of those things, but sure could be. Hey, Jeff, you're pretty high right now, right? We got Jeff and Mike here as well. I'm Jeff. I was Wes's field tech and Mike's our producer.

I'm on Loretab. I had hernia surgery, and they, They just went in there and took out, decided to take out a little two for one, took out two hernias. Two birds with one stone. Yeah, we knew about one, and they went in and checked. And, you know, it comes with the territory when you can bench 200 pounds. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Once you get up in those 200s, you got to prepare for a few hernias, right? Yeah, exactly. Right. So I was walking in the mall the other day, and I want to, I, I want your guys' opinion on if this would have been a funny joke or not. Okay. So there's like this six-year-old kid who had Wolverine Clause, and we were on, like,

the upper floor of the mall. And he walked right past me, and he, like, brought up his Wolverine Clause. And afterwards, you know how sometimes you think of, like, the perfect joke? But, like, after the fact. Uh-huh. Yeah. I was thinking I should have jumped off the rail and just, like, killed myself because I was acted like I was scared of him with his claws.

Yeah, I don't know if that's the perfect joke. But then, like, he would have been, like, his whole life, he would have had to have been like, oh, man, I shouldn't have scared that guy. Yeah, that's true. You would have taught him a valuable lesson. Neither of them are funny, I would say. But it would have been a hell of a performance art exhibition. Like, it sounds like the way Andy Kaufman maybe actually died.

He just took a joke a little too far. He just, like, shows you his little plastic claws, and you just kind of like, woo-hoo and jump off. Wouldn't have been funny? One of my all-time favorite tweets is, there's this group, I don't know, there's this group of real like pretty boy bros,

kind of like Gen Z, TikToker kind of bros, you know? And they're all like standing there in a line and the caption is like, you see me and my boys at the pool, what are you doing? And this person that I follow tweeted, killing myself in front of you and forever altering the trajectory of your friendship and lives. It just really was so funny to me.

Yeah, the six-year-old won't care. That won't stick with him. I think you should have to do it. Next time I'll be ready. They're all desensitized to these six-year-olds. They would just think it's some like movie thing or AI or some shit. Jeff is Mike here with us too? Are we going to introduce him as well?

Oh, he got me. Stay with me, dude. Oh, all right, maybe I'm on Laura Tab too. All right, well, all three of us are here. Yeah, you just, like, took five minutes to intro. He's in a different time, you're right. It takes your voice a little long to get to him. I'm sorry, guys.

I don't even think my joke would have been funny. I've come around on the joke. I think it would have been hilarious. It would have been a good joke. Yeah, yeah, it's a good prank joke. You only get to do it once, but you might as well make it count, you know? All right. Well, should we do this thing?

Yeah, what are we talking about today? Oh, it's going to be a little surprise. Today we are, I'm going to pitch you guys. Okay, so I'm doing this trip, you know, I'm guiding. And the more I do it, the more I think, man, it would be really fun to do some tooth and claw trips where listeners can, you know, pay to go on a trip with us and hopefully see some cool wildlife. And so what I want to do is this will be the first. Could me and might come this time?

It's not. Keep going without us. Well, I'll probably keep going without you too, but we'll do one that you guys can go on to. Anyway, I want to pitch you guys, I want to do hopefully, you know, this will be hopefully the first of a few episodes where I'm going to pitch you guys on some ideas for where we could take our listeners on these trips. So today's pitch is going to be one that I'm just going to have to get a thumbs up or a thumbs down from you guys after we're done. Is that okay? Yeah, sure. Okay, so it's going to be kind of a different episode format from normal.

but I think you guys will have fun with it. Okay, that sounds great. Yeah, so this episode's just like us talking about business behind the scenes pretty much. Yeah, exactly. You guys get a BTS of Tooth and Cloud. All right. All right. So you guys know how much I love Brazil.

I love the culture. It's really vibrant. I love the people. They're warm and welcoming. How many claws? Brazil is a 10-cloth place for me. The wildlife is amazing. I love to do a trip to Brazil, and I think,

think I found a really fun spot for us to visit. So this place is called Ila the Keimada Grande. It's roughly a 160-acre island that's located about 90 miles from the coast of Brazil and the massive city of Sao Paulo. So we've already got a plus. The nice thing is that we can just take one flight to Sao Paulo and then all we have to do is get on a Navy vessel to go to the island because the country does have really strict regulations that only allow the Navy to visit this particular island. So so far it sounds perfect, right? Do we have to just? Do you have to join the Navy? Uh, maybe, but I mean, like, perfect destination so far.

So on this island, we're going to be treated to beautiful crystal clear, tropical, or maybe subtropical Atlantic waters. They're full of vibrant rocky reefs, amazing marine life. The island itself is covered in a mix of rocky outcroppings, large meadows, and lush rainforest. So a really big bonus for us is because there's like not any kind of like establishment or anything on this island. We're going to be camping. And a bonus is there aren't.

any rats or mice or even small mammals on the island, which is great because we'll be camping and we don't want those kind of like pesky rodents getting into our food. Or children. So it has this really nice. Children count under that umbrella to you. Yeah, yeah. We don't want. Listen, just a quick little interjection here.

We're being really hard on kids so far. I know having parents is hard, but you made your choice. Having parents. Having kids, sorry. Having parents is hard too. Whatever. We all suck and I hate everyone I've ever met. Me most of all.

Yeah, you had some annoying kids on your plane ride home or something? Yeah, we don't need to talk about it though. Sorry, Wes, keep going. No, my flight from Mexico City to Brazil, I had a kid screaming behind me the entire time for nine and a half hours. And I wanted to do the Wolverine thing in reverse to that kid. And then you were too tired to make the guards laugh at Buckingham Palace. What? That's from I think you should leave.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. forgot about that. So, how does the Wolverine joke work in reverse? I just want to deconstruct this real quick. So you're going to pull out your claws. And the kid's going to jump off. Jump out of the plane.

Sure. Okay. And it'll be funny? Yeah, it'll be quiet at least. All right. Okay. So we're going to have this really nice diversity of landscapes on this island. Mike's not going if there's no sloths.

Okay. Just let me get, let me get to it. All right. Nice diversity of landscapes. We're not going to have to worry about rodents. We're going to have it all to ourselves. Well, I shouldn't say we're going to have it all to ourselves. It's also home to a number of different bird species

that migrate to the island for nesting or a few that live there permanently throughout the year. And those birds share the island with about 3,000 hypervenomous golden lancehead snakes that exist in such high densities that the island is often thought to have the most venomous snakes per square meter of anywhere on planet Earth. So it sounds great, right? Wow. Sounds perfect.

I'm a little scared now. There are a couple downsides. I hear the rocks can be pretty sharp on the island, and it's pretty steep, and there really aren't like that great of beaches. So it's like, aside from that, it sounds like a total slam dunk to me, right? Everything sounds perfect. Yeah. Oh, the snakes.

Wait. Wait, the snakes, you guys saw the snakes as a con? I get a little scared of venomous snakes. All right. So I guess I'm getting a little bit of hesitance because of the snakes. because of the snakes, which is a little surprising to me. There's no rodents for him to kill? What are they even eating?

So I'm going to give you a little bit more information on this island. Humans, dude. And we'll get to that. And maybe I can convince you guys that we pick this spot for our trip. Seamen. Seaman is what I meant. You think they... Seamen?

Yeah. Oh, it's like seamen. Because only the Navy can go there. Yeah. Okay. I'm just going to leave that. Leave that there. Okay.

This island is often called Snake Island by the... popular media, so Ila da Kemara Granji, it's likely a mountain top that was separated from the Brazilian mainland when the waters in the area rose about 11,000 years ago after the last ice age. And there is this species of Bothrop's viper called Golden Lanceheads. They're closely related to the Jararaqa species of South America. So Bothrops are these lancehead snakes like Ferdilance, Jaraka, and these golden lanceheads are all in that group. And they're often considered the most dangerous snakes in Latin America. They're found throughout Latin America.

Oh, geez. And they're known for their really potent venom and their general willingness to strike defensively. So this is an incredibly feared group of snakes. Like if you ever go to Latin American travel around, the venomous snake that people are worried about is always from this group of snakes. Almost always. So Ferdalance being kind of the one that in like Costa Rica and San Francisco. Central America and then down here in Brazil, it's the Jada Raka. Not the Golden Lancehead.

No, but we'll talk about why that is. So when the Golden Lanceheads were first separated from mainland Brazil during the end of the last Ice Age, they likely had a lot of different prey species to pick from on the island, including their typical prey, which was small rodents. And venomous pit vipers that feed on rodents are generally able to use that heat sensing ability that we've talked about to bite that rodent in just the right spot, to meter out the just the right amount of venom for the animal. And then they use that really complicated olfactory system that we've also talked about

with the Jacobson's organ and their tongue flicking in and out to navigate to right where that animal died. And then they find it and eat it. So it can take a while for that mouse or that rat or that whatever to die. But the snake can track it down and find it and eat it. And they can track down the specific one that they bit. Oh. So they have all these tools to track down a mammal and eat them.

Yeah. So it's like a little like a tracking chip in. almost or something. Pretty much. Yeah. We talked about it a little bit in our episode with Kendall, I think, or maybe one of our other episodes, but. Yeah.

Anyways, these Golden Lancet's. It's like that movie we watched, Mike, hard target. That Van Damme movie. That's John Clod Van Dam one. Where they can track them all down to kill them before they get to the river. Well, there's a run snake in that movie, too, right? That movie's not great. I'm not giving that a full recommendation.

But you know how to put me in a good mood by bringing it up. There is a venomous snake, yeah. Yeah, he sets a trap with it. Punches it in the face. Yeah, he does. All right. So over time, these snakes that were on the island that were separated from the mainland, they started to whittle down the number of rodents because they are really efficient rodent hunters.

And they're whittling down these rodents. And these rodents don't have any connection to the mainland either. So they don't have any new animals coming in. There's no immigration. So they started to die out because they had this really effective natural predator. Meanwhile, the snakes didn't really have any natural predators, so they flourished, but they were going to run out of food if they didn't figure out some kind of new strategy. So what they did is they started feeding on birds, and in particular, they fed on one species of

flycatcher that often shared the same habitat as them. It wasn't migratory species, so it's not like they had them all year, but they had enough of them to where they could subsist on these birds and some other invertebrates and stuff. However, when a snake bites a bird, it doesn't always kill it outright and the bird can fly away. And if that happens, the snake loses this ability to track it down. Why doesn't it just hang on and go for a ride? Well, that's a good point. But sometimes, you know, they strike with their fangs.

So they don't always hang on when they do that strike. They can't evolve to kind of do that. And that's actually part of what these lanceheads evolved to do, like hold on after they bite. but as they were evolving to do that, that wasn't their first kind of thing. But because of this problem of like their prey now having a way to get away and they're not able to track it down to eat it, the snakes had to evolve a more efficient strategy. And in that case, the main part of that just meant evolving a really super potent venom. So rather than like, you know, them biting a mouse and it dies a little bit longer, they bite a

bird and it dies instantly. So they were immediately able to kill these small species of birds, and it gave them this evolutionary alternative path when rodents finally died out on the island. And their venom's thought to be five times more potent than the venom of the Jadadaka vipers on mainland Brazil. And mind you, this is the most feared snake in Brazil, the Jadadaka, and these golden lance heads have venom that's five times more potent.

And they also deliver venom in 90% of their strikes. So they hardly ever drive life. Oh, Dan. Yeah. So this isn't a snake you want to mess around with. These are on that island you're trying to get us to go visit. Yeah, like the densest venomous snake populations in anywhere. I'm coming around on it.

Some people think, some researchers think there's up to one snake per square meter on this island. So pretty much anywhere you're standing on this island in the forest, at least, you would be close to one of these snakes, like within almost an orange like spaghetti. Yeah. So do they live anywhere besides the island? No. They only live on this island. They uniquely live on this 160-acre island. That does kind of make me want to see you. My plot of land in Montana is a little over two acres. So just think like this would just be like 80 of my house. It's not a huge island by any means. Like this is an island you could walk across in an hour or two.

It's like an F-1 lap or something. Sure. Yeah. Probably even smaller than that. Anyway, this kind of island evolution, really interesting to me. It can lead to some really unique species. This particular species of lancehead, the golden lancehead, is much different from its closest relative that's on mainland Brazil. The mainland one, the Jadaraka, is darker, colored, larger, and almost completely terrestrial. So it just stays on the ground. While the one on the island is both terrestrial and arboreal, it goes into the trees to get these birds. It's this really pretty pale golden color, and it's slimmer. And the crazy thing is that all happened in just 11,000 years, which is a relatively short window

when you're talking about evolution. So stuff on islands can really speed things up. All right. So Snake Island has become somewhat famous throughout the world, and there are some stories then that have swirled around it and that have been told in Brazil about this island. So I'm going to get into these stories quickly. Some Brazilians think the island being so populated by snakes isn't actually a result of this island divergence and this evolution of it being separated from the mainland, but actually

a trap that was set by pirates looking to protect their gold. So the idea is that these pirates long ago arrived on the island and the isolated location and the rugged geography of that island made them think, okay, this is a perfect place for us to hide our booty. But that wasn't like enough for them. They figured like, we got to protect this a little bit better. So they also decided to release thousands of venomous snakes onto the island, and that those snakes would protect their treasure from any, like, would-be treasure thieves. So it seems like a good idea, but it's also, to me, seems like a trap

that you don't necessarily have, like, a back door into it. Yeah. Like, you got to wonder if they put all these snakes on the island, and then they were just, like, floating there and looking at it, like, quietly, like, wondering. Okay. Wait a minute. How do we get on the island now? Yeah, it's pretty messed up to, I'm thinking of like the, I'm doing a lot of references here, but that second kill bill where she like gives the guy the million dollars, but then there's a black mamba in there.

Yeah. And it's like the happiest moment of his life and then like the worst moment of his life right together. True. Like can you imagine finding all this pirate treasure and getting bit by venomous snake right when you find it? You know, at least you get to feel that one fleeting moment of true happiness. Yeah, like uncut gems. Yeah, like uncut gems. I know.

Yeah. That was like the most frustrating death ever. I think he went out as happy as he'd ever be. So I think he was happy ending. That's the thing, though. It was instant death. Yeah. All right.

So this is a fun idea, this pirate thing, but these snakes don't exist anywhere else in the world. They're only on this island. So there's no way that these pirates could have brought them in from somewhere else. And then it's really unlikely that they brought them in and that they evolved so quickly into this new species. Because if there were pirates with gold, it would have been likely in the last like 500 years. So I don't think they could have evolved that quickly. Them bringing them to the island could have made a good movie. Snakes on a ship.

Yeah, that's true. Prequel. I've had it with these mother fucking snakes on this mother. other fission galley. Pirate shit. Yeah. So there are a few other fun, in quotation mark stories that circulate around this island in the history of the island. One is that a while ago there was a fisherman that decided to stop on the island to get some bananas

because there are some really large visible groves of banana trees from the ocean. And the idea is that this fisherman came ashore, went and got some bananas. and then a few days later they found him in his boat floating in essentially a pool of blood, completely bloated and totally dead. So I don't, none of these stories have any kind of fact check to them. I looked up a lot of resources trying to figure out if there's any kind of real basis to these stories. But everything I found reported these two stories.

Sounds like my type of story. Yeah, it is kind of fun. Another one involves the last lighthouse keepers that lived on the island. So in an effort to help boats avoid this island that's out in the middle of nowhere, the government of Brazil built a lighthouse there in 1909. But one night, the lighthouse keeper, his wife, and his two children woke up to a really terrible surprise. Golden Lance had snakes were slithering into their house through the windows in the night. They ran for a boat that they had docked not far away,

but they were bitten by snakes that were hanging in the trees, and the man and his entire family died from snake bite. As a result, the lighthouse was automated and no one was allowed on the island by decree of the Brazilian Navy. So again, it's hard to say if this story has any truth to it. If it does, what I think probably actually happened is that they had a lighthouse keeper on the island

and the snakes either bit him or someone in his family and then it was just like too scary so they decided not to have anyone out there anymore. They did end up burning large sections of this island just because they were so scared of the snakes. The Brazilian Navy, I think, did it. And that's why it's called the Ila jicamada, which means like burn. So anyway, the whole idea of snakes like slithering through a window trying to get people. We've talked about this on the podcast before.

Venomous snakes don't see us as a source of food. So they don't hunt us down. They bite humans defensively when we disturb them. So this isn't something that they would ever do. They wouldn't try and attack these people or like slither into their house with the intention of trying to kill them. We've talked about one snake that does every so often decide to hunt humans. Do you guys remember what that one is? Python.

Ritculated Python. That's the only one that I know of that has been known to actually consume humans. So venomous snakes just don't do it. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Okay.

So currently only research. teams are allowed access to the island and only after a really lengthy permit process, they, um, what are you laughing about Mike? This just sounds like such a terrible place to plan a trip to. We all have to get like certified and educated and stuff. To get a Navy boat 100 miles out there. Well, just wait.

I think you guys are going to, I really think you're going to give this a thumbs up. Okay. So both by researching the island population and a captive population, researchers at the Boudantan Institute in Sao Paulo, which is a place I visited. It's super cool. They've been able to learn a lot about the golden lance head snake, and here are a few of the things I learned while researching this episode. So they are smaller than their mainland cousins. On average, they're less than three feet long. They're this really beautiful golden color, and like all of the Bothrop species, they have a triangular-shaped head, and the adults feed on two species of migratory bird, with that fly-catcher

species being the most commonly eaten. And then the younger lance heads will eat amphibians and invertebrates. They're only found on Ila da Kemada Grande, but if they were released on the mainland, it's very likely that they do really well in the Atlantic rainforest on the Atlantic coast of Brazil. But that's not like, I don't think that's a good idea, even if the snake were about to go extinct, just because it's not, like this is kind of a snake that evolved this certain place. and I think us moving them to a new place,

it's kind of like when people ask me, should we move polar bears from the Arctic to the Antarctic? That's not their environment. It's not where they belong. And even though these two are so much closer, if it were to happen naturally, like if there were a big storm and a snake was on some debris that floated across and then they settled on,

you know, in the Atlantic rainforest, that's one thing. But us doing it ourselves, to me, seems wrong. So that's just a quick aside. Okay. They have a heat of course. Cool looking though.

They are really cool. I think you have to take that into account. You know, how cool the animal looks. Like, does this make our world a better place? Yeah. A more beautiful place? Yeah, I guess. Sure.

They have a really hemotoxic venom that differs from other Botthrop species and that it has a corrosive ability to it. So where other lancehead vipers have a venom that has a really strong anticoagulant, so they bite you and you bleed really heavily, Golden Lanceheads have a venom that's so corrosive, it would likely melt human skin and flesh. So it can literally melt your flesh away. Yeah. However, because in modern history, the only people allowed on the island have been Navy Lighthouse, Upkeep Cruise, and these research teams.

There haven't been any recorded invenomations from the snakes. Yeah. So nothing, though, that's been recorded that's like for sure a Golden Lancehead in Venomation. and that's likely due to the protective clothing and like the huge amounts of preparation and caution that these visitors take when they go there. It's the perfect crime though, because if they did get one of them, they just like melt the guy all the way away. It's like that bucket in Breaking Bad. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that ended up being a perfect. It went so smoothly. All right. So it is thought, though, that bites from the snake would be significantly more devastating than bites from other Lancehead species. and now I'm going to tell you guys about bites from the other lance head species where the effects have been documented. So they result in death 7% of the time when left untreated and 3% when treated, which is pretty normal for like a pit viper.

But they are hematoxic, so there's a lot of tissue damage and long-lasting effects from the bites. And people bitten by lancehead snakes often lose digits, limbs, or have other lifelong health effects. So it's really gnarly venom. And here are some of the symptoms you might have if you were bitten by a lancehead snake. And remember, these are the ones that we know about, and golden lance heads might have five times the more potent venom than these guys. Immediate burning pain, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, sweating, headache, massive swelling of the bitten extremity, hemorrhagic blebs. A bleb is essentially a huge blister that's filled with fluid. In this case it would be filled with blood.

Bleb also to me sounds like a really good thing to call someone if you're mad at them. Yeah, that is a good one. All blisters are filled with fluid. Not all blisters, are they? Yeah. Okay. Well, these blebs are different somehow. Local necrosis, so necrosis is essentially where your tissue dies.

Bleeding from the nose and the gums. Echemosis, which is really terrible bruising, skin reddening, hypotension or low blood pressure, which is due to blood loss and platelet destruction, increased heart rate, anticoagulation, vomiting blood, pooping blood, peeing blood, nose bleed, nice. Intercerebral hemorrhage, which is your brain starts to bleed out, kidney failure, secondary to hypertension and bilateral cortical neurosis. So also you start to get, oh sorry, necrosis, not neurosis.

You start to get necrosis in your brain, like the tissue of your brain starts to rot and die. There's some usual, usually some discoloration around the bite site, rashes, and in general, death results from hypotension secondary to blood loss. So your blood pressure gets so low that you die from blood loss, kidney failure, and intracranial hemorrhage. So again, that brain bleeding. All right. That all sounds like some of the worst things. I'd like to see a commercial where, you know, like, peptobysmal lists out like the things that their medicine cures.

I'd want to hear a song about a medicine that can help with all that stuff. Yeah. It sounds like an overnight or in Vegas, dude. Yeah, dude, that's you recovering from a hernia surgery. Essentially, though, your whole body starts melting and bleeding from the inside. Made me think of the dude in Raiders the Lost Ark that sees the Bible ghosts, that just like we just see him, like, melt. Melt.

You know. That's crazy. All right. So mostly, no, a lot of the stories that are around about this particular group of snakes revolve around the fur to lance, which again is a snake you find in Central America, Costa Rica, those kind of places. I did find a really good story about one of those. We are going to do them at some point, and that episode will have a more fleshed out story. But for this episode, I just wanted to pitch Snake Island as one of our.

potential locations for a tooth and claw listener trip. So what do you guys think? Thumbs up or Thumbs Down for Snake Island? Mike's giving a thumbs up. Yeah. I'll give a thumbs down. Big thumbs down from Jeff. Two thumbs up for me and Mike.

So that at least passes it for me. I'm out voted. No, I think we got to be unanimous on this. But I think we'll re-vote. Yeah, that at least deserves a re-vote. We're not eliminating it from competition. Yeah. The hurdle's.

are that, so we need to join the Brazilian Navy. That'll be a little tough. And we have to become no sloss. No sloss. Yeah. Yeah, that's another big obstacle. They do have lizards. Which is cool.

Yeah, that is a pro when we're doing pros and cons. Like, you are going to for sure see some wildlife there. It sounds like we're going to see some snakes. It's almost not a chance you won't. I watched a video where one of the researchers was there and she's like looking and she's like, I see five snakes right now. And it was just like she was standing in this little patch of four. She's like, I can see five of them right now.

And I was just like, oh, man. This place is gnarly. Anyway. That's like really intimidating. Yeah. Imagine like your ship goes down or your plane crashes and you wash ashore on island. And you're like so happy that you're on dry land. And then it's like Snake Island.

Oh, anyway. All right. So it moves on. Listeners, feel free to let us know if that is a place you'd be in. interested in going if you're if you're open to recruitment in the brazilian navy and uh camping with with like three or four thousand deadly snakes all right okay well that's it for the story or the uh it's not really even a story in the pitch uh you got a couple little stories in there yeah i'm going to go into our categories so my first category that i gave you guys is top two islands for

movies that you'd want to visit maybe we should also do a third one of an island you really don't a visit if you can think of one. So I'll give you my two that I want to go to. I don't think these will come as a surprise to anyone. Number one is Jurassic Park. Yeah. Which is Isla Neublar, right? Or is it Sorna?

I always forget which is which. Newblar is the original, I think. Yeah, Isla Neublar. That's your number one pick? Without a doubt, that's number one. Yeah. I think I can beat it. Okay, let's hear it.

I'm going with the Count of Monte Cristo Island. Just with all the gold. The most treasure there is in history. I think I'd rather see live dinosaurs. Then be the richest dude ever? Yeah, I honestly think I would. I don't think I have a limit on the amount of money for live dinosaurs. So I'm sticking with my pick.

Mike? I'm going to go with the Michael Bay Island. You get a cool little track suit. Scarlet Johansson's there. She's cool. Yeah. You get extra bacon sometimes. Pete Scarlet, too.

Something. Yeah. All right, my second choice is the island from Swiss Family Robinson, just because the variety of animals out there, I'm going to go after they've already built their tree house, so I just get a really nice little guest room in the tree house, and just get to have fun trapping tigers with my friends. So that's my second pick.

How about you guys? I forgot mine. Give me a second. I'm going to go with the island. Have you guys seen the movie Joe versus the volcano? I haven't. The weird little black sheep of the Meg Ryan Tom Hanks, rom-com trilogy?

It's like one of my favorite movies from Tom Hanks, but it's got this big volcano where there's like ritualistic, sacrificial stuff going on. That'd be kind of a fun little world to peek in on, you know. Okay. Maybe not spend a whole lot of time there because I don't want to get sacrificed, but enough to, you know, check it out. Yeah.

Jeff, you can duplicate one of my answers. if one of mine would be your other choice. I know, I just, I had one that I like that I can't think of now. I'm on drugs, you know. Yeah, I do, I do, what's the one, what's like that party island and Pirates of the Caribbean? Oh, yeah, Tortuga. Yeah, I'll do Tortuga. That sounds like a good time.

All right. And then the island I would least want to go to for me. Or maybe the mermaid island in one piece. I knew you're going to do one piece. Oh, yeah. I think for me my least island is the island of Dr. Moreau. Because I saw that movie when I was way too young. And it really like messed with me.

All the half animal, half human creations. Like it really, I don't know, that was like a really hard movie for me to see when I was like eight years old. You should revisit it. It's good. I don't want to go there though. So that's my island. I'm not going to. It's not a good movie at all.

No. I was actually going to pick a Pirates of the Caribbean island. The one he gets marooned on after he gets forced to walk the plank. That one just looks like it sucks. It's just like a little sandbar out in the sun. He's got all that rum out there, though. And Kear Knightley's with him. Yeah, but I'm not a drinker, so it's like, I don't know.

And then you'd have to drink. You think you'd drink the room? I don't think you would hydrate you. No, it would hurt. Doesn't it dehydrate? You get super dehydrated from all that room. Yeah. My,

Oh, shoot, I forgot it again. That's fine. Jeff's on his own island right now. The island we'd least want to go to. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah, the Lord of the Flies.

I don't want to be there with those guys. That's a good call. Got a little crazy. What if you're an adult, though, and they're all their size? And you could just like, you could totally be their God. No? No, dude. They're taking you out.

They're going to get sick of your rules. They'll push that rock down on your head like piggy. That's true. Yeah. Poor piggy. You'd be done in two minutes. All right. It's a good pick. Okay.

So my next question is what would Mike and Jeff do? We're going to say you're marooned on Snake Island, Brazil. What are you guys doing to survive? Hmm. The problem's going to be sleeping for me. Like I'm eating snakes. Yeah. I'll eat those suckers.

popcorn. Okay. But. It's not going to last too long. Pagetti. Sure. I don't know. I'll probably just have to sleep in that

lighthouse. Yeah. If you and Mike were there together, you could do like a lady in the trap thing with the snake. That'd be cool. How far away is the island from the coast? 90 miles.

Oh, you can't swim that. Oh, you're not swimming that one. No. Unless you make a little sail out of snakes. Ooh. I wonder if like... Skin them or are the whole body?

I'm not sure. I haven't really... Well, you could make a net to catch fish with all those snakes. They're basically ropes. Okay. That's a good idea. Dude, this would be the easiest island to survive on. You got just unlimited ropes.

Yeah. Rope is like the most useful thing. Not unlimited. There's only like... I wonder, so this island's not that big. How many total snakes are there? Do you know around? Somewhere between...

There's somewhere around like, 2,500 is what they think now. There used to be they think up to 400,000 on this island, though. I could just kill a man. Yeah, you might be able to. Yeah, you might be able to wipe them out. Go for it, you know. Get myself a good whack and stick and see if I can just make them extinct.

Like Homer when he's doing all the ninja flips and stuff. Yeah. Plus, you'd want to at least try to find the treasure. So, yeah. You want to get in there. Plus, Jeff, you've always had that goal of being responsible for the extinction of an entire species. Yeah, I'd like to take out just one species. Yeah, all right.

Wait, did you say there used to be 40,000 and now there's 2,500? They think there used to be up to 400,000 of these snakes on the island. Doesn't seem positive. That doesn't even make sense for how big the island is. It doesn't. It maybe would make sense. It really doesn't. But that's what I read.

Yeah. Yeah. They have eliminated a lot of the four. forest on the island and there used to be a lot more prey for them on the island, but you're right, it doesn't make sense there would be that many snakes. That'd just be an island of snakes. Yeah, just a riding island. Yeah.

Our next category is going to be a top animal that you don't want to live on an island with. So this island is going to be densely populated, we'll say 160 acre island that's densely populated with that particular animal. What's your top pick that you don't want to be? with. Like a venomous snake might be my top pick. Sounds terrible. Like a black mamba. See, I feel like I could...

Like, worse would just be like a spider maybe, but still, I don't know. I feel like I could avoid snakes enough to where I'm not always afraid of them. And I know a snake's not going to come from me. I just have to be careful not to ever disturb one of them. So I think for me, I'd be much more scared to be on an island with a predator that wants to eat me. Yeah. So I think my pick is a Bengal tiger, just because I think that's the one where I just know

sooner later. Like how many bangal tigers? We'll say like there's 10 on this island of 160 acres. You know you're going to get eaten by a tiger sooner later. So I just like, I think that's my number one pick. Do they, do bangle tigers do their hunting at night? Yeah, I think they do, they're like crepuscular hunters and then night hunters. Yeah, I see.

That's bad because that's when you want to sleep, but you can't. Because you got to like, that's when they're out for you. Bored yourself into that lighthouse. Tends a lot. If it is like four, I might take the tigers because like I just hate the idea of walking around and getting bit by a snake that I didn't see. Yeah. And you just got to figure out a way to kill four tigers then and you're like.

Yeah. And then like, and I get food if I kill them too, you know. Yeah, you could make a lot of snake traps for the tigers. You can't really make a tiger trap for the snakes. Well, you know, you don't really have to, though. You just need like a rock. And I really just need to be able to kill one tiger, and then I get their claws and teeth as weapons to kill the other ones with.

Yeah. See you. Okay. All right. So you're both picking the snakes as your worst, like of all the animals in the world, that's your worst possible animal to live with on the island. I mean, if there are that many of them, yeah. But I was more aligned with you as far as like a big cat.

Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. If there's, if it's just like a one-on-one, kind of situation. Okay. What is, for my next category that I had for this episode, outside of Snake Island, we're not going to count Snake Island.

What's the number one travel destination right now that you guys think you would want to go to with Tooth and Claw listeners? Man, where you're at, the pot and all is really high to see some jaguars. And then Svalz Bard would be like in my top three for sure. Spall's Guard Svalbard Yeah Yes, Svalbard would be cool

I will say I follow a polar bear biologist that I know on Twitter That worked in Svalbard Jeff, you have said it So many different ways That I have to take a beat now To remember how to say it

Yeah No, I get that way With myself all the time He worked on Svalbard And it's changing so quick That I don't even know If it would be worth going to anymore for polar bears

Anyway, that's a really grim thing that I don't want to get into, but those are good picks. Mike, what would yours be? Is there like a pretty nice rainforesty area of India? Yeah, there is. I think that'd be really cool. The Western Ghats. Yeah, India was kind of like where I was thinking too because you can get tigers, snow leopards, leopards, all in one trip, maybe sloth bears, elephants, some other things.

But India is a really hard place to travel, so I don't know if I'd like... Rino. bunch people that I don't know. I think I would say Kenya. I think I want to go like on a safari in Africa. And I haven't been to East Africa and that's the place for like all the best wildlife. So I think for me it'd be Kenya or Tanzania. Probably Tanzania actually. What animal would you most want to see? Leopards. I haven't seen. That's one of the few big cats that I haven't seen in the wild. So I'd want to see leopards the most. Can you see rhinos?

You can't. And then I saw lions when I was in South Africa, but at a distance. I'd want to see lions closer to. But you know me. I like my big predators. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill. Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news.

Bring your AT&T or T Mobile Bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal. So get away from that unfortunate phone bill and get to Verizon. Run, ride, canoe. Whatever it takes, we'll be here. Bring your AT&T or T Mobile Bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best network. work a better deal no surprises that's verizon best network based on route metrics best overall mobile network from the u.s second half 2025 all rights reserved must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person who gave me the deal additional terms conditions and restrictions apply

all right well jeff do you have some listener questions for us nope oh okay what do you got i have i'm doing i'm doing listener stories this time so every now and then i like to switch it up if you guys have any good animal-related stories or just want to share a story with us, send us an email at tooth and claw mailbag.com. And yeah, I chose the day I'm high. Is it tooth and claw at mailbag? No. It's just tooth and claw mailbag at J-Mell? Oh, yeah, sorry, tooth and claw mailbag at gmail.com. Okay. There you go. Okay. So this one's from Annie. Hey guys, I got a quick little story with question embedded in it. I was staying up in a rustic cabin in the mountains of Lake Antigua in Guatemala in late November 2015. It was a chilly overnight,

not freezing temps but cold. I woke up at first light sleeping on my back. When I rolled to my right, I thought to myself, there's dog poop on my pillow, and then quickly snapped out a slumber to realize is a coiled snake right next to my face. Oh, they are easy to mistake. I can see how you'd make that confusion. Yeah, that's happened to all of us. We both panic, elongated, as did I, to get out of my sleeping bag. As I pulled the bunk bed back, I was on the top bunk, it fell to the ground.

How long do you think we were bed sharing? Did I overreact the remaining month of my stay by sleeping in my hammock bug net? If he left on his own, would he have remembered my warmth and soft pillow another night? A lot of questions there. I don't know how long they were sharing. I don't think she overreacted by being a little scared about having snakes in her bed after that. Guatemala does have those fertile lance botropes that we talked about, and that's like their most common venomous snake there.

It's not a snake you want to mess around with, so I'd be a little nervous after that. But I don't know much about like their habit forming. Like I don't know if they find a warm, comfy place to sleep. If they return to it, I would imagine so. Yeah, it doesn't seem like an overreaction to me. I don't know what kind of species it was. But if it was coiled up like a little bit of poop, it could have been a fertile lance. That's kind of how they sleep.

Yeah, she said it looked just like those plastic poop for pranks. Interesting. Huh. Well, I'm glad Annie didn't get it. bit by that snake. That'd be sucky place to get bit in your face, too. Yeah. Yeah.

You know? That's like, I don't know. Is that the, where's like the last place you'd want a venomous snake to bite you? Well, I think face and one other spot are in the running for me. Those are my two spots. Yeah. He's scared to say penis? No, I just wanted to leave some humor in it.

Obfuscated a little bit. All right. Mike, would you rather get bit in the face or the penis? I was thinking, like, the worst place to get bit would be, like, my baby niece. That'd be a bad place to get bit. On your niece. But the penis. I would rather a face bite than a penis bite, I think.

Okay. I'm done having my face the way it is. I'm not using it for much anymore. You want to use your range to bit? I would have thought the opposite for you, but that's fine. Yeah. Okay. All right.

This one's from Connor. Brand new listener hopped over from National Park after dark. I'm on your Black Widow episode at the moment and had to pause and write immediately. You mentioned a story with the guy that captured the spider in his kid's container and the doctor still didn't want to say that the widow bite was possible. Something very similar happened to me. Like any proper wild minute soda boy I spent most of my childhood summers Running through the woods

With nothing but a pair of blue jeans A cool stick and a dream You know having a good stick Sounds like a Sounds like the title of like a Bruce Springsteen album Like those sticks that have like a little like Kind of built in handle to them Get one of those suckers

I've had run-ins with bald eagles Black Bears a cougar, you name it. But today's email isn't about that. Long story short, I was bit on the knee by a brown recluse and had to go to the doctor after it started to look rough. But the doctor, and the two we visited after that, refused to say it as a recluse bite because they don't live this far north, in quotation marks. What's crazy is my dad was bit by one too before I was born. Eventually, I was given some antibiotics and my knee swelled up to the size of a great fruit for a week. To this day, my kneecap flesh is spongy and has no feeling.

I can't feel the other knee either, but that's because I was ran over by the Halloween hayride. Bad knee look. My question is, you can't feel your knees? That's insane. My question is, why are medical professionals so hesitant to? acknowledge a spider bite? Is it just, is it just because it's uncommon?

Yeah. So where, he said he was in Minnesota? Yeah. Minnesota. Minnesota. Minnesota. Yeah, Minnesota.

I, I, I, I, you're gonna tell him it wasn't one. I don't think it was. Yeah. But that doesn't preclude it from being something that messed up.

No, no, no, no. I don't, like there's plenty of other spiders. It could have been a brown widow. there's like some other spiders in Minnesota that it could have been for sure. I have read a number of articles though that say that like brown recluses often get blamed for a lot of other spider bites and their range in the U.S. is much smaller than we actually think it is. But they're from a whole like family of spiders where other members of that family can also have a

really similar type of bite. These kind of like violin spiders, they have the brown recluse has a little violin on its back. But like hobo spiders are a really similar one. They have a violin on their back? Yeah, it looks like a little violin, and that's how you can tell it's a pretty recluse. As Connor's mad about you saying it wasn't a recluse, they can just play that little violin for them.

Yeah, you can play that tiny little recluse violin. Now, Connor, honestly, I don't want to say for sure it wasn't, because I wasn't there. I don't know, like, who knows? There's Brazilian wandering spiders that have bitten people in the UK, because they've come over in boxes of bananas. Banana boxes. Yeah, so it's hard to say that this wasn't a recluse and it could have been.

So I'm not going to say it wasn't. But I will say that... But they don't really live in Minnesota. That's not part of their range in Minnesota. And I think it could have been another spider and I don't want to take away from your experience. It sounds awful and sorry about your knees, Connor. The doctor really ought to have still done something in the... that situation it feels like.

Yeah. Yeah. You want some kind of treatment. Hernia. I went to a doctor and I was like, I have a hernia and they're like, no, you don't. So I had to take medication for like six months until I just went to a new doctor. And I'm like, oh yeah, you have two hernia. It's all the more worse here too because it's not like doctor visits are cheap or easy

to come by. So you go to one. And then when they like just don't even give a shit, it's the worst thing in the world. It's like, oh, I just spend a small fortune to come in here and have you not even believe me. So, Connor, like, don't take that as me trying to say, I don't, I'm not validating your pain of this whole experience. I'm just saying it probably wasn't a reclusive. It was probably something else. I think your doctor, Jeff, was trying to say it wasn't a hernia.

He was trying to tell you, you had more than one. It's two. He just didn't. You wouldn't listen. I guess I was confused what she was telling me. You just kept cutting her off. well they do get so boring when they're trying to tell you that's true I love Jeff told me he said that while he was in the hospital

our mom was the one that was supposed to get all the info of like what happened while he's in surgery and she just like forgot it all yeah first two she's like I call her after and she's like so it wasn't a hernia I was like what because like they told me like oh we got both We got the hernia and there was another hernia, and we got both of them. So then, like, but I was kind of drugged. So, yeah, I called mom, and she's like, oh, so it wasn't a hernia. I was like, what?

And she's like, yeah, no, it was like some, like, fat deposit that was making a bulge that they, like, cut out. And then she's like, well, actually, that sounds just like a hernia, doesn't? I was like, yeah. And she's like, yeah, well, he was saying it wasn't a hernia. I was like, well, what was it called? And she's like, oh, I don't remember. So that I had to call back in. And he was like, yeah, no, they were too hernius.

That's so funny. So who knows? Love you, Mom. Yeah. She can get us back for that one on the next Mother's Day episode. Sure. You know, she's coming her hands together right now. Okay, from Tessa.

Another new listener. I was hoping you could help me understand if I was stocked by a cougar or something else. I was in a coastal southern central California. One night, my friend and I had decided to go on a little hike on a private property up on the hillside in the coastal sage scrub habitat. I had been hiking in these hillsides for years, and I always knew cows and coyotes would be up there and have seen both animals there before on my hikes. The hike we took ended up on a large cliff overlooking the city below and the ocean with a little picnic table for us to sit at. My friend and I sat at this picnic table and chatted until we both started hearing a wrestling behind us. We both stopped and listened and the wrestling stopped too.

We got back to talking but soon heard the wrestling again but closer than before, so we stopped and listened and the wrestling stopped too. This continued on a few times until we were. we got so freaked out that we started yelling out to see if someone was there. We thought it might be a person. From the wrestling noises we heard, we could tell there's a large animal and is getting closer and closer. We felt like it couldn't be a cow, thinking cows wouldn't have that kind of stalking behavior. I found an empty can and filled it with rocks to shake it. We stood on top of the table to make ourselves appear bigger and started yelling more.

It was so dark we didn't have a flashlight, so we couldn't. I couldn't see anything, but I remembered that I had a disposable camera on me, so I started taking pictures with the flash on to scare what was ever out there. We were on a cliff, and the only way out was past whatever was stalking us, so we just stood on this table for a while looking out and yelling until we felt that whatever was out there was no longer there. We eventually booked it out of there back to the car. My friend and I at the time were both avid backpackers and rock climbers and rock climbers.

and spent a lot of time outside, and neither of us have ever been so freaked out in the wilderness before. Week later, weeks later, I got the film from my camera developed, but the weird thing is the pictures I took were completely black. By I'm positive, I'd use flash, and the camera should have picked something up. There's nothing, though, like the film had been a race. So my question, am I incorrect in assuming this was a cougar stocking, or could have been something else, perhaps another animal, or maybe an alien that came down and erased my film to remove all proof of alien life?

It's that or a phantom cougar, yeah. Also, is there something we should have done differently to protect ourselves? First of all, I want to hear your guys' theories, and then I'll give mine. Yeah, I'm going lens cap with the pictures. Yeah, I think you're probably right there. No trust for our listeners over here for me. And then I'm going with a human, I think it's a person stalking up on him. Or a cow.

All right. Yeah. I perked up when I heard the word cow and I was like, I think that's got to be it. Yeah. I think small cows are deceptively sneaky. You can't count it out is all I'm saying. So I'll say what I think. I think it's pretty unlike.

Cow snuck up on me once. Remember that, Wes? When I was asleep. Yeah, I too remember that. There's like a whole herd of cows that snuck up on me. Yeah, I think we've told this before. but we were checking bear traps. And I came back to Jeff who like, we didn't have cell service there.

So we would just meet at a certain point. And we would like had to meet there because if we didn't, we like wouldn't find each other. So I came back once and I was a little late and Jeff had been waiting there for me. And he just fell asleep in like a little metal right by the road. And when I pulled up, there was like six or seven cows standing over him just like staring at him. Like a whole herd of cows, like surrounding him just staring down at him. There was probably 20 in the whole herd, but there was like six right above you. Uh, yeah.

And it was so funny. Anyway, they were like, I was like dozing off in like every five minutes I'd open my eyes and they'd be like twice as close. And then I just like fell asleep. Some red light green light with those cows. As far as this story goes, I'm just going to say I think it's unlikely it's a cougar. First of all, I think if a cougar were stalking you probably wouldn't hear it. wrestling nearly as much as like if you're saying that you're hearing a large animal wrestling that means in my mind you're hearing a lot of wrestling and a cougar wouldn't make a lot of rustling it would

make a little bit but it would probably sound like a small animal because that's a really good careful not to wrestle so i think it was probably either they're so quiet they are really quiet so i think it was probably either a deer or a coyote i think would be the most too likely where you said you've seen coyotes there before i think it's and if you're by a picnic area, it'd be really likely to have either of those animals there looking for scraps that have been left behind by people. So I'd say probably one of those. When it's that dark, I feel like a raccoon can make a lot of noise in bushes, you know? Yeah.

Like I've been in the forest before where it's dark and I hear rustling and I'm like, oh, is that a bear? And then it's like a ground squirrel because like it's quiet and dark and stuff sounds big when it's not. But I do think, honestly, of all the animals we've talked about, the least likely is that it's a cougar. But not impossible, but very unlikely. We should name this, like, these listener stories should just be called Wes is a buzzkill forever. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. But, you know, that's what, well, the first one you gave them, you're like, that wasn't poop.

That was a venomous snake. Yeah. All right. So now do, like, just a handful of listener questions. From Nis Ard, what's the strongest animal all three of you can take in a fight together? So we're like teamed up. I think for like these hypotheticals too, we could do it like a hologram fight. So it's not like we're being like brutalizing it to animals.

Like a virtual reality. It's hypothetical. Yeah, sure. All three of us? I would say like a mountain line. But you would say that for one of us. I think one of us could stop a mountain lion from, like, from killing you,

but I don't think one of us could, like, beat it necessarily. Oh, really? A full-sized, like, grown adult mountain lion? No. But I think all three of us could probably beat it. I'm going with a cow elk. Okay. Yeah, I think we could probably bring a cow elk down.

I agree with that. But a mountain lion can bring a cow elk down, too. I was just at the San Diego Zoo this a couple days ago. I think I have a new answer for biggest animal I could beat by myself. fight. I could beat a taper in a fight, one of those big old chunky tapers. You were wrong, my friend. I could kill that thing so easily. But all three of us together, let's say, yeah, it seems like a caribou. Yeah, I think there's some good ungulate answers. We got good chemistry. Yeah, we do have we know how to work together. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. It's a good question. I'd have West bite it for

sure. West has a strong bite. Yeah. M.R. Auntie wants to know, how can you tell if snakes like you? Those cuties are hard to read. They don't like you. I'm just going to tell you right now. I know lots of reptile keepers and handlers, and they all are very honest about, not all of them,

but most of them are very honest. They're like reptiles don't like you. There's no, sometimes I think they know that you're like a source of food, so they accept you as like that, but they don't like you, there's no emotion there. Yeah, I love when people say, like, that their pet reptile just loves them so much. Yeah.

And it's like they have like a black beady eye. There's like, how do you know? Even if it did love you, there's like no way for them to show affection. Like, they can like snuggle up to you, but you're warm and reptiles like warmed. And you feed it. Like, you're the one that feeds it. Like whenever I. I heat up Smithers mice with a hair dryer.

And when I turn on the hair dryer, he comes out of wherever he is and he's like waiting for me. He hears that hair dryer and he's ready to go. So like you could say that he loves the hairdriar, you know, but he doesn't. Like he loves eating. All right. Allie K. Smith wants to know thoughts on the fourth Indiana Jones. So that's Crystal Skull. Do you plan on seeing the fifth?

I'll say this much. I recently rewatched Crystal Skull because I'd only seen it in theaters. And I was, every once in a while there's a movie like that that I rewatch where I'm like, you know what, this is a little bit better than I remember. This isn't as terrible as I thought. Yeah. It was worse than I remembered. Like I hated it so much.

I was just like, this is a truly, this is a travesty of a movie. It's terrible. What was it about it? The CG, the like Shaila Buf's character. Shaila Buf's really bad in it. And I kind of, I think. I think he's a good actor, but he was awful. He was terrible.

It was all just like set pieces, too. There's no chemistry between anyone. It was terrible. It was just bad. It felt like a amusement park ride. It didn't feel like a movie. I hated it. So I was Shaila Buff's driver at Sundance Film Festival.

And I drove his mom around a ton and we'd like go get tea together and stuff. Yeah, I remember that. She told me Kanye West. She told me Kanye West stole his Indiana Jones hat that Harrison Ford gave him. Oh, that sucks. Oh, man. Yeah. But I've heard it in an interview where he said that he gave it to Kanye West.

Huh. But I think he just, I think he tells his mom that Kanye stole it. Yeah. That's been funny. No, my favorite part of it's the one that people hate the most in the fourth one is the nuke. I like when it gets in the fridge. Yeah. Yeah, that's an okay seat.

Like that to me felt Indiana Jonesy, but like, yeah. I don't think Gussie is a new one. I don't know if I will either. Yeah. It had just been gotten like glowing reviews and people are like, this feels like an Indiana Jones movie, I think I would have seen it. But the fact that it's getting like middling reviews and people are like,

I don't think I really care. The first three are so unimpeachable in my mind that I just, like, let's just leave them alone. I was on the verge of going to see this newest one. thinking it'd just be like an hour and a half romp like okay get in and out it's like almost three hours long i think oh no it's just it's too much and it's already getting bad review so it's like i there's just like compelling reason to go i got barbie coming up i got op andheimer coming up i got mission impossible yeah i'll say there's so much fan service in these movies too i just can't deal

with it anymore where you know they're gonna like there's gonna be some part with his whip i'm sure where he like does some cool thing and then it's like I'm back or something you know it's just going to be some terrible fan service over and over and over again I just can't handle any more of it well there's just like a scene in the preview where he has his whip and he just like ducks under a table and like 20 people tried to shoot him oh yeah it's like 20 people shot the table instead of shooting him it's like that's insane yeah it was the yeah I remember the first time I saw that preview and I was like, I might walk out of this movie before it even starts. Yeah.

Me and Harrison is offensive. We share a birthday, me and, me and O'Harrison next week. Oh, that's cool. No way. Yeah. Yeah. Patrick Stewart, too, all three of us. Oh, man.

Who's balder between you and him? Patrick Stewart. Yeah. Quite a bit. All right. Well, that's it for listener questions. All right. Thanks, guys, for...

listening to me and my pitch for Snake Island. Oh, I remembered one other thing I wanted to tell you guys. So I was in Mexico City last week, and I went to this restaurant, and they had tacos. You're all over the place, dude. Yeah, they had all these crazy tacos that you could have, and I was there with this guy that lived there, and he just ordered for us. And one of the things he ordered were fried crickets and then fried ant larva. Wow.

And everyone at my table was like, oh, are we going to eat this? and I was just digging in. I was like, here we go. Yeah, they were way good. But frying anything is like a one-way ticket to me eating it. Yeah, they don't care what it is. And for me, you know, I've really gotten over that hump with eating bugs. So I figured I'd let you guys know that world's coming around to eating bugs.

You think you're relapsing a little bit? Yeah, dude, I got the itch now. I just want to eat more bugs. We got to have any intervention. All right. Got to make him eat another moth. Golden Lancehead is a new animal for us

So we're going to give it a claw rating I'm going to go ahead and get it So they're like those yellow Really intimidating looking snakes Right like really Here let me show you You're really intimidated by pit vipers in general Can you see?

No that's that looks like a bush viper But the one below it looks like a golden lance head They don't have the little horns Oh they don't? No That's a really pretty snake Yeah they are really pretty snake Yeah, they are really pretty.

It's not as pretty as the horned ones. No, no, no. But they are really pretty. They kind of look like a golden cotton mouth or a copperhead or something. So for me, I'm going to go ahead and give them, I'm going to give them an eight. I love all snakes. I really love venomous snakes. I think pit vipers have some of the coolest adaptations of any snake.

And I think it's really cool that these ones evolved on their own island, that they figured it out, even though they lost their main prey species. You know, as I talk about it, I think I like them more than an eight. I think I'm going to give them a nine. Yeah. And the hyper potent venom, all of that. I just think they're a really cool success story. I'd love to see one in real life.

I have seen one at Budauntan, but I mean in the wild. So I'm going to give them a nine. I'm going to give golden lance heads a nine. Well, I'm going to give them a four. Yeah. I don't know. I like snakes, but like venomous snakes do freak me out a little bit, Especially the ones that look like pit vipers for you.

I want them to have a rattle on them because it rattles cool or, you know, be more colorful, like a brighter color. I want my snakes colorful or rattling pretty much is what I'm saying. They're like bright yellow. We all have our types. They're not that bright. They're pretty yellow. They live in a green environment. I think they're pretty easy to see.

All right, that's fine. I'm not going to talk you out of it. This is what they look like, right? Yes, that's what they look like. Yeah, it's not. that yellow. That's like a brown yellow. Okay. So I'm giving them a precursory eight with a strong feeling that the more time I spend with them in my brain now that I know they exist, I think it's going to go up to a nine. I love snakes. The venom facts you listed off, those are all super interesting and like,

I don't know if like coolest is the word to use, but like the most powerful or impressive or whatever the word is I'm looking for. That's what it is. So I am going to go with an eight for now. But I'll keep you updated. Next episode, make sure to ask me again, Wes, about Golden Lance Heads. I think the one you showed me before was an eyelash viper, by the way, not a Bush Viper. Great. Okay, so we got eight, nine, and four. Five, 26.

Okay, fair enough. All right. Well, that's it for this episode. Again, a little bit different from our normal format, but we got to, you know, just like these snakes, we got to diverge from our history sometimes a little bit and just branch out on new path history history yeah and i wanted to do a correction corner before we finish oh okay let's hear it dude on the um dillon episode that i led what was his last name oh dilly mcwillie dillan mc williams dillan mc williams uh so i said that pigmy rattlesnakes don't live in

Utah, me and West went to the Hogle Zoo and saw one called, labeled a pygmy rattlesnake habitat, Utah. Well, yeah, it was different than just a pygmy rattlesnake, though. It was like a vented pygmy rattlesnake or something, pale vented kidney rattlesnake or something. Yeah. But basically, I think it used to be called a midget rattlesnake. Right. And they changed the name to pygmy rattlesnake. Right.

So, oh. So I was wrong in not finding out that they changed the name of one of the types that I was looking at. Yeah, we were 80% wrong on that one because there is a species of rattlesnake just called Pigney Rattlesnake and they don't live in Utah. This one's like has something else attached to that name. So it was a gray area. But I do think that was a good correction to make. But we went a little hard on him. Yeah.

We made a joke about it. And then... Yeah. We were the fourth thing that he got attacked by. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, thanks everyone for listening.

Thank you, everyone, too, for writing reviews. I was reading the other day. They made me really happy. It's always nice to see that you guys are responding to the show. That it's... I mean, some of those reviews say that the show's, like, been able to help people through some dark times, which to me just really makes it worthwhile. So we really appreciate all your kind words.

For those of you that are subscribing, really has helped us to focus on the podcast. So thank you for that. We had a really fun subscription episode last week, too, if you're not subscribed. It was about lions and sidecars. And like, it went off the rails, literally and figuratively. We've had it.

I feel like we've had a real strong run on subscription episodes. Like that one, the Rhino episode I thought was really good. Like, we've had some really fun ones. So. Get in there, binge them. Yeah. You know? It's the cost of what?

A couple, like three snicker bars a month, pretty much at this point? If you don't like them, just ask me, ask me for a tenor next time you see me out on the street. I'll happily oblige. Yeah. If you ever see us and you want to subscribe, we will pay, if you see us in person, we will pay you the first $10. Ask us for $10. That's a promise. Yeah.

All right. Well, I'll do it, man. Unless it's like an arranged meetup. Let's put like... That offer expires September this year for me. Okay. For me, it doesn't expire.

As long as it's not an arranged meetup. All right. Okay. All right, everyone. Well, we love you and we will talk to you soon. Love you guys. Bye.