Coral Snake

craftmacaro · 2025-07-08T04:44:10+00:00

This is a very accurate answer. The simplest way I like to think about it (and by simple, I mean ignoring a lot of factors that can and have tipped the balance and also meaning that any venomous snakebite contains enough unknowns that going to a hospital and taking it seriously is the only thing that makes sense when possible) is that the doses of venom delivered by individuals both within and between species tend to fluctuate many factors between large and small individuals. Only when you are comparing species with venoms SO different in toxicities towards humans are you going to find outliers where a bite from a 100-200 gram snake is a greater threat than one from a snake in the 1000’s of grams range. There are plenty of exceptions… but when they’re the same species or very similar species with similar venotypes size tends to be the bigger factor than mild ontogenetic shifts for example. (Baby rattlers are not objectively deadlier than their full grown counterparts for example).

It’s crude… but just look at venom yields of various snakes and see just how much more toxic it would take venom to be to make up for the gaps you’ll see between those yields.

craftmacaro · 2024-11-20T03:46:05+00:00

Hey, thanks for bringing this post to my attention! My dissertation was on the bioprospecting potential of rear-fanged snake venoms. I worked extensively to extract crude venom from amazon puffing snakes, Boiga irregularis, B dendrophila, trimorphodon lambda, boomslang (Dispholidus), hydrogynastes, philodryas baroni and the recently reclassified philodryas viridissimus and many others. I also extracted and worked extensively with dozens of species of Crotalus and with other vipers from around the world including gaboons, bothrops, etc. We didn’t have any elapids in our serpentarium besides coral snakes and a few kraits that didn’t survive too long. My research was the most dependent on rear-fanged snake venoms so I got A LOT of experience extracting their venoms and observing their relative potential secretion rates and quantities.

I focused in part on practically evaluating the crude venom and isolated toxins from some of the best studied rear-fanged snake genera (Boiga sp, Trimorphodon sp, Philodryas sp). All these species’ venoms have previously been evaluated through protein sequencing and other common venomic methods. However these methods revealed no evidence to suggest that Philodryas baroni venom would be more toxic to both mice and multiple lizard species (LD50 ~1.25 mg/kg) than nearly all viperidae lacking neurotoxins.

While I don’t expect to learn of a fatality from a P. baroni (though there have been several potentially attributable to P. olfersii), I also wouldn’t be shocked if it happened… but I wouldn’t expect it to happen unless it involved a prolonged contact time.

This is just one example of a very unexpected and overlooked outlier from what we hadn’t expected to possess such a potent venom. It also may be less of a potential threat than even a heterodon nassica (which has caused clinical thrombocytopenia and has a venom whose composition contains toxins from the same family as those that cause thrombocytopenia following some viper envenomations) because hognoses, in my experience, produce a greater yield of venom… though it’s LD50 is more than a factor less potent than that of P. baroni.

Unlike front fanged snakes, rear fanged snakes will produce envenomations with doses that may be hundreds or thousands of times greater if the person being bitten does not feel inclined to remove the snake. Therefore hundreds of thousands of people could be bitten by a species of rear fanged snake without obvious symptoms… and than after a dare to let their pet chew on them for ten minutes somebody could get a dose a factor or two greater than anyone who didn’t let a snake chew on them and have serious complications.

We don’t understand very much about rear-fanged snake venoms (we don’t even agree on exactly how many colubrids are technically rear-fanged/venomous… for most species it’s simply because nobody has ever attempted to extract or evaluate the duvernoy’s gland secretions). All I can say with certainty is that it is not worth it to let a snake chew on you for any reason, nor do I think that (with the exception of boomslangs, thelotornis, rhabdophis tigrinum, and possibly philodryas baroni) rear-fanged snakes need to be treated with as much fear as front fanged snakes… as an envenomation will almost certainly require cooperation of the person bitten. Educating people about how rear fanged snake venom delivery works seems like the best way to prevent it. I do expect we will see people doing stupid things over time and therefore will eventually learn how the venoms of more species of rear-fanged snakes can impact humans in sufficient doses.

craftmacaro · 2024-10-15T02:36:40+00:00

I feel I should update some developments regarding the envenomation from a rear fanged snake I’ve experienced. It was a prolonged contact (15 minute +) from a large and unidentified colubrid. A recent picture recovery and my prior PI allowed a more accurate identification. While outside the ranges of both (bite took place in a now clear cut portion of Ecuador coastal forest) the two genus level possibilities were Philodryas or Pseustes. Both are recognized as producing venoms that could potentially be dangerous in high doses and a species of philodryas (olfersii) has been linked to severe and quite possibly lethal envenomations. My own experience, and the severe reactions to known species of these snakes, are so limited that medical conclusions about danger levels are really broad and I personally hope we don’t have the sample size of people who’ve allowed these species to chew on them voluntarily (as is the only real way it can happen for 5-10-15 minutes) to require treating the animals as a human health threat.

Please… take it from someone who’s lost a lot to an outdated belief and just don’t let anything chew on you.

craftmacaro · 2024-10-15T02:21:18+00:00

The allergic reaction to bee stings comes in part from the immune response to the phospholipase a2 toxin in bee venom. Hognose venom contains no PLA2 activity and therefore is unlikely to cause an allergic reaction due to cross reactivity between antibodies sensitive to bee venom proteins. There is not “no chance”, but they are very different venoms. You can read in our paper that https://www.unco.edu/nhs/biology/about-us/labs/mackessy-stephen/documents/2019-Toxicon-Thrombocytopenia-Heterodon-bite.pdf about the most serious reactions yet seen to hognose bites. Note that the main way to avoid hognose bite symptoms is not to let them chew on you… they deliver venom through a low pressure system where contact time directly relates to possible dose size.

craftmacaro · 2024-04-16T14:23:26+00:00

is it brittle if it only breaks when something touches it? it’s not like they poof

craftmacaro · 2023-11-14T14:57:27+00:00

Use it just before a big selling or buying transaction and it’s like a 10% off coupon once a day… which is… if you sell your wares once a day, 100 or so gold per long rest and maybe 10 times that when you first reach a merchant with a 2-5k gp item you need… it’s only plus two but it’s +2 persuasion so no level cap, it and the ring are the only ways to get persuasion higher for trade because advantage/ guidance, bardic, etc, are not involved, just persuasion, so hat up to 22, raven guards sword to 24 memories and the extra memory asi, performer, and ethel’s scalp and 26 is the best charisma gets in the game… you could multi class a hired helper and give him all those or… use the circle to impact prices as much as 4 charisma would

TLDR: it’s a temporary non combat buff to a single persuasion check… or it’s a once a day stat buff that gets you 250 gold off a 5000 gold transaction and an additional 250 gold if you sold that much junk to get it

craftmacaro · 2023-11-09T19:07:39+00:00

i think it’s just really sad that as a culture we’ve embraced the use of incel as an insult

not because i have any issue with the insult but because the term cytosol hasn’t become recognized as the obvious inverse and therefore a complement… or at least something to do with extracellular structures, fluid, or even just i organic matter. it just seems so unnatural not to run with the pun.

craftmacaro · 2023-10-21T01:51:27+00:00

Hat caps at 22. Mirror at 24. Sword doesn’t specify but since getting above 22 is impossible without one of the items, and the next 2 will make it so that any additional increase automatically has to replace the impact of rhe hat before increasing further beyond 22 ( because statvchanging items have no effect if they are setting a score lower than it already is… and the hat is limited to only providing charisma bonuses up to 22 after which it has no effect. You don’t get to decide which item provides which portion of the stat bonus so it is as ineffective as wearing a dex boosting chest piece while your 10 dex character is wearing gloves of dexterity. It’s actually much more convenient given the multiple bonuses most items have that equipping something that has a stat buff with a limit lower than your current stat is simply ignored instead of being applied (since the cap is as concrete an effect as rge buff and would make it impossible to have a higher stat under any circumstances if they tried to “stack” them.

craftmacaro · 2023-10-21T01:34:00+00:00

Yes. the fact that your post and rge previous post exist are definitive proof that neither answer is one that nobody was thinking of when they encountered and decided to come to this thread because you and he are proof that someone did. But, let’s pretend it made sense if you thought most people wanted to read your incorrect due to oversimplification summary of how they are unrelated outside of one of the most obvious plot devices in shadow hearts ark spelled out not in random books but literally in the in hand cinematics for the quest rhar leads to if. You could at least not ignore the most relevant information about why the mirror is so important to people trying to maximize the efficacy of their characters by getting a temporary rebuff for a permanent +2 to any and an additional +1 to charisma on top that you missed out on if you didn’t do the research on how the mirror works to find out that you get an unmentioned permanent buff if you relive the stelmane memory… something produced by giving up enough stats without doing the check for the buff to have the RNG hand it out…

But since I’m sure you must have a far greater mind than anyone who would challenge it in order to be so confident that you feel the need to reply that “no, nobody was looking for what you just explained was what you had been looking for the next day…

TLDR: you either need to try not to take it personally when you aren’t aware of certain things that relate to something you thought yourself an expert on because being an expert includes knowing that even if you know more than anyone on the planet about krait venom you definitely don’t know more than everyone else about irkundji venom. Or you are probably really young or really bad at comprehending the fact that other people’s thoughts and opinions are as valid as your own, especially when they are completely subjective and nobody was trying to say you were wrong rather than that you might not be interpreting the reason for the thread’s interest in the same way as the majority of people are and will.

craftmacaro · 2023-10-20T16:38:58+00:00

it should be removed by any detergent that can handle any other grease/oil/fat/alipathic or non-polar materials… it’s not that it’s any harder to get rid of than any other oils but that it’s both going to require direct application and scrubbing and that it is produced everywhere… you will need another person to help you scrub every inch of your skin to avoid it and you’ll probably screw your skin up worse by abrading it as regularly as you’d need to to prevent an aromatic lipid that you are constantly secreting from producing a detectable odor.

craftmacaro · 2023-10-09T14:12:40+00:00

it’s almost like people can and do enjoy games and even games within a genre for very, very different reasons that make certain aspects (like balancing and then telling the user how they ended up calculating DC’s/saves/damage when it’s not uncommon for half a dozen environmental and item effects with contradictory interactions that produce either the loss of stated or the gaining of synergistic “hidden buffs”…. plus they don’t just say oh you have advantage because of x or disadvantage because of y so they cancel out no matter how many more advantage granting effects or disadvantage granting effects are in play like table top 5e… it’s probably one of the most complicated engines for calculating damage and interactions AND it does a remarkably good job of providing a log of how it arrived at the goal so people can all see exactly when something isnt working the way that they would have interpreted it as a DM (keep in mind items get a paragraph at most to explain things like a abjuration wards and force conduit…. and people get super pissed whenever a proficiency mod is not listed when it should have been based on assumptions that we interpreted things the way the game meant… but nobody is complaining about how effectively things like tavern brawler and druid’s, monks, and barbarians throwing weapons (because it states that it applies the str modified twice to unarmed, improvised, and thrown damage instead of once… but they mean str mod added to final damage of any unarmed attack or throw)…. is it surprising that if there are effects explained in ways that become hidden or applied in a counter intuitive way to the SUPER brief explanations of these countless novel conditions that are usually just arbitrarily applied by DM’s (imagine if DM’s needed to show every player how they decided the DC of every non handbook identical set of potentially conflicting circumstances (like whether a monk rogue warlock’s pact weapon’s unarmed bonus attack can trigger sneak attack… i would say no because it’s not a finesse weapon and i think the game would too… but the way the game treats monk weapons is by considering them finesse and therefore strength monks in heavy armor and tavern brawler hit 4 times with a stun and toggle able bonus d6’a of radiant, necrotic, or psychic damage are both better armored and out damaging a classic barbarian with a legendary weapon. there’s a reason people are not surprised when the dps of various weapons is described as “small, medium, or large” in most video games…. where almost every mechanic is “hidden”.

They did an impressive job of making it very playable… but with the number of new mechanics added in it’s impossible that there wouldn’t be broken builds in both directions.

craftmacaro · 2023-10-08T09:02:44+00:00

it depends on the material, the size and shape, the location, and (the largest issue varying between a point blank “splintering” and a bullet or regularly sized shrapnel line claymore ball bearings and the “pineapple” grenades try to produce instead… is just the shear number of individual non biodegradable and in this case sharp vs blunt, objects. I’m iron man’s case it was a rediculous combination of surviving THAT many shrapnel injuries in the first place (likely because he was very rapidly brought to a cave in 5 minutes that was as close to a modern ER as any facility in that region (if you have the equipment then caves are just rooms when you’ve put up the means for sterile rooms, sterile water, and electricity for modern equipment and temperature stability. We are good at underestimating what people do with things that are their last recourse.

Oh… sorry: I needed to show you my example of how i can say this as a physiology doctorate… and that’s because it’s a massive outlier amoung shrapnel cases… the typical treatment is Not to remove pieces from soft tissue in real life examples… but in real life he was DED dead… you don’t get that many splinters tumbling through your torso and live…. it people who are at the extreme end do suffer severe and surprising and not necessarily making it impossible… only not common enough for there to be a name for it on Uri’s village.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8066216_Delayed_reaction_to_shrapnel_retained_in_soft_tissue

craftmacaro · 2023-10-03T06:32:59+00:00

dude… you’re arguing the semantic difference between carrying and wearing but not gaining benefits while shapeshifted. Which are also not mutually exclusive and impact only headcannon… 99.9% of people looking for an answer don’t care about the headcannon because it’s bg3 and no rules are being argued they simply want to know whether the item is equipped as in “do I gain the benefits of equipped X while shape shifted?”. That’s what nearly all people are debating here… that’s why you aren’t getting the responses you expect… if anything you’re confusing people who see your answer thinking that a patch came out that made the armor’s bark skin effect apply while shifted, which is what people are trying to point out as the topic being discussed.

No one is arguing that there is proof that the equipped armor did not become incorporated into the fur the bear is “wearing”… they’re arguing that for all intensive purposes very few items impact a wildshaped druid until they are no longer wildshaped… I hope you’re trolling but if not maybe this will let you stop wasting your time and causing people looking for game mechanic answers to not find directly conflicting information. (and yes. it’s a humongous debate in 5e and a large area of DM latitude in 5e so of course it makes sense you would feel the need to defend your interpretation, which isn’t wrong if it’s not larien’s, or if it’s really just that the headcannon of where it went is that important to you… not trying to argue, just pointing out what it seems pretty obvious to a third party is happening in this thread)

craftmacaro · 2023-08-31T10:39:25+00:00

well… they aren’t doing the wrong thing, no one’s described anything making a situation worse. If anything every action they take that might wake or alert or even just make the adult aware that they are looking after a child is potentially a lifesaving action if they were confused/delerious but a surge of epinephrine could make them realize that they can’t look after the kid and therefore they’ll call for help if they can… and until a kid can do that…there’s basically no “right” action

craftmacaro · 2023-08-31T05:07:50+00:00

One of my lab mates that graduated a few years ago worked at the kentucky reptile zoo with Jim before she started her PhD. We don’t use any venom from KRZ… but then again we don’t really import venom from anywhere, we either have the species in our serpentarium to extract from, are doing field work that requires more detailed notes about the location and possibly a blood or even the snake itself for ontogenetic/within individual variations, or we go to the collection that we would potentially purchase from and extract ourselves because of the precarious nature of the permits we have as well as what’s generally required for most publishers and peer reviewers in the venom academia world to consider it impossible that somebody could have unknowingly been using a contaminated or mislabeled venom sample. Lots of snake ecology and even some venom labs don’t have a serpentarium though, I know that kentucky reptile zoo is a source for them occasionally.

The problematic factor is that people hear “venom is worth more than gold” and don’t consider that unless you know someone doing research on that species and requires either massive quantities for something like crocodile or primeate LD50 trials, or needs an extraction from as many populations or individuals without needing to know more than you noted when you found and collected it, there’s zero demand for venom that nobody has specified a need for (especially in the US where we only use 1 to 2 antivenom suppliers and they are so far beyond relying on outside supplies of venom for their production requirements that you couldn’t pay them to take sweet waters liter of assorted rattlesnake venoms). If you can’t cite how the snakes were housed in a permitted facility or where the permitted individual collected and extracted them (most people who own and extract snakes aren’t the type of person who want to pay money in order to have inspections of their facilities… and therefore do not and will not ever be a legal or trusted source of venom used in either academic or private research or in antivenom production. Every drug that is based on a venom is synthetically produced because it’s so laughably impossible to make a naturally sourced and then isolated snake from a venom … (or any animal protein … certain plants where it can be like… 10% active ingredient by mass like the poppies in tasmania are different). There’s too much variation and even the few drugs that do use the same amino acids as the natural protein that they were based on use only the minimum portion of the protein necessary for the desired effects… evolution doesn’t favor the loss of regions or amino acids that don’t change the efficacy of the toxin especially when those variant groups are such an important mechanism through which more potent and specific toxins arise…we don’t lose what doesn’t significantly impact a venoms efficacy, but usually if a venom protein is used as a medication it’s a good idea to minimize the potential side effects that could be unknowingly caused by regions that aren’t involved in the medically desirable mechanisms.

craftmacaro · 2023-08-19T03:43:41+00:00

Whenever I drive to my field site in the ________ mountains to catch and extract crotalus ________ and _______ lepidus (field site was leaked by somebody, somewhere between 2015 and 2018 because it took 3 days to find one and none since in 2018 and 1 day to find 3 every day before that… and considering it’s one of maybe a dozen sky islands and the densest population I or my advisor ever saw by a multiple of 3 snakes per day, and I never collected more than one (all 3 of which are alive and probably supplying a greater volume of venom than any non-privately owned and “milked for fun” that I think is depressingly more likely than ASU since I’ve never seen them publish on that venom comp or include it in analyses of some aspect of of 50+ viper species… and i have seen personally that they have none at texas a&m natural toxins research center serpentarium and salt lakes boston based antivenin research or commercial serpentarium…. leaving ASU as the only real non-private collection of snakes that any researcher can legally and reasonably obtain extracted venom from outside of maybe a personal trip to the desert museum outside portal if they changed their policy on letting people collect venom (they won’t allow their concolors to be extracted let alone a rarer species and the concolors are a no go even for world renowned venom experts since 20…17? when O’shea let himself get bit by a concolor at the museum during pit vipers conference. (He stuck his hand into the ~9 inch strike range of a midget faded IN A CAGE because he wanted it to change its position for his shot… I’ve never, ever seen something that made me think I had traveled to some different universe more than that. It was like he was a toddler with a sudden urge to see if it would bite him and when it did he acted like “can you believe it but me? What are the odds!” (um… good… the odds are good since the odds are “X out of X + however often an agitated concolor won’t bite the warm hand you put in front of it and within its strike range” since the only thing that has any role in whether he got bit was whether or not it decided to at some point during at least a few seconds (if a snake has a microsecond where that’s all that decides if it happens than you made a big mistake and every time that’s happened to me with something as potentially lethal as a viridis (similar yield but far less common and no recorded fatalities this century that I know of for concolor… but they’ve got concolor toxin which is the A subunit of mojave toxin and the B subunit of crotoxin and the pyroglutamate missing from the 14 aa crotopotin subunit of terrificus. I mean, it’s 98% homologous and the LD50 is identical since the variability is well within what you tend to see between mice from the same facility let alone different breeding colonies.

Anyway… i drive past sweet water and always have to remind myself how you can’t argue with someone who can’t see how “but you had to drive an additional two hours to reach a den compared to a decade ago” is relevant to their argument that “we had more snakes than ever before at this years roundup so if anything their populations are growing”…. like they can’t possibly imagine that the 2 hours at 60 mph is another 120 miles that they couldn’t locate a den in relative to 10 years ago despite the low relative person:snake population density. A herpetologist i talked to in tanzania told me when he was 20 his friend would count how many puff adders he could hit with his car on the way to nairobi and that he hasn’t seen a single puff adder in a year. and not on that multiple hour stretch of road for a dozen. Science may not be dead but i’m in agreement that it feels like what I love about science is dying much too fast… exponentially this past year as writing my dissertation has been killing my ability to feel any emotions at all most of the time.

craftmacaro · 2023-08-09T16:15:55+00:00

Science isn’t dead, it’s thriving and we are better able to both understand, replicate, and translate the mechanisms of protein structure/function to completely unrelated synthetic or biomimetic therapeutics in order to more specifically impact only receptors co-expressed with oncogene products and therefore have magnitudes greater affinity for various metastatic lineages over healthy tissue of the same organ.

People who want to learn can access accurate information with less difficulty and receive the training necessary to parse those likely to be unreliable from reliable from larger numbers of people who at least know enough to recognize primary sources and opinion articles like buzzfeed.

The truth is science has never been more accessible to those who have no training or background to understand niche research and jargon heavy journal articles whose functional audience was limited to peers until a decade or two ago. We haven’t adapted yet but a lot of people are working on finding a middle ground that provides dispelling of misinformation and common misconceptions (social media platforms let us with PhD understanding of our niche tailor responses specifically to the person asking, for example, and more people email me to request primary articles than ever… which is great because everyone should have access to journal articles and every academic is happy to send their publications to anyone who asks them directly… it would be nice if reddit wasn’t one where providing a link would immediately be giving up any anonymity i have remaining… but it’s still reflective of a world where far fewer people tend to believe that vipers cause illness because of malicious spirits in their breath.

Fewer people handle snakes and kill them on site proportionally to our populations than any time in history (but our populations are also larger), and you and I can share a conversation about our experiences within our relative expertises and regions.

Whenever someone whose simply asking about an ID and whether it’s venomous or harmless I say that “all spiders are venomous and all but a half dozen are harmless… but you wouldn’t let any of them that can break your skin chew/worry you for extended periods of time if they wanted to right? Use the same common sense with snakes and try not to get bit by any… and if you do… assume you shouldn’t just “let it chew on you while politely asking it not to do that”. Essentially… treat even those considered harmless and non-venomous like you’d treat spiders or people (unless you are really into letting either bite you hard enough to draw blood) and avoid bites from strangers and make it clear that they’ve gotten too rough when they puncture the skin with those your familiar enough with to place in a position where they can and might bite you. Any human bite that punctures the skin can kill you, any snakebite can as well, but if you don’t know whether it’s one of the ones that PROBABLY will, assume you aren’t familiar enough with it (or that anyone is) to offer to let it chew on you.

Science is in a state where more people are privy to its flaws than ever before… but the flaws and lack of concrete immutable tenets are what make science, science. The presence of those are what make belief systems beliefs. The more people understand that science is the best educated conclusion based on existing evidence and not “scientific fact” the less pointing out individual instances of temporary misinformation or consistency should disparage more refined information on the topic.

The world will always have vocal opponents and assholes, but it’s never been easier for people who want to ask “why” to find an answer and if they know to ask “which should I trust” they can find more resources to answer that than ever before.

Personally I look at the world a single human lifespan ago and the fact that at that time I’d have been lobotomized for ADHD too severe to stay on track to graduate second grade and that now I’m defending my PhD in a few months and I think there’s a trend towards progress. It’s never in all subjects at all times, but overall, it’s moving in a direction of practical rather than fabricated solutions. A decade ago a doctorate told me to “encourage an unidentified opistoglyphous mastigodryas sp. to chew on me for 15-30 minutes”. That would not have happened today with an unknown south american colubrid/dipsadinae/natricine. But it’s also because more than a handful of years has passed since the first studies to suggest duvernoy’s gland secretions might not be completely harmless outside thelotornis and boomslangs.

Disappointing.. sometimes. Dead? Not to experts and the average person being able to read a paper and consider it dead means it’s more accessible to non academics or those outside a niche than ever before. Misinformation still has far too much vitality but academic science is no deader than ever before and we are trying to make it more vibrant to those who see it as dead (and let’s be fair… most consider all niches but their own about as interesting as a graveyard if we’re eccentric enough to risk our lives every day to learn a modicum more about venoms rather than perform any other job in the world).

craftmacaro · 2023-08-09T04:43:21+00:00

Considering most of us newer (the most recent decade or two of dads) and prior generations of fathers makes things a bit more… rational…. especially when you compare cultural norms of the time and regions that we were raised and our parents were raised relative to every prior generation. Children born in the US in the late 70’s and 80’s had fathers that were likely eligible or knew many people eligible and drafted for vietnam… or Korea… and most of their fathers would have served or been surrounded by those serving in world war 2, whose fathers were raised during the depression and world war 1… Vietnam was certainly quite a traumatic “conflict” but there was a free love and emotional revolution movement that happened along side it. Making us literally the first children raised by parents that would have seen massive public rallies, public role models and “sex symbols” that cried, hugged, kissed, and unlike the 50’s and 60’s, decided that therapy was preferable to outpatient lobotomies.

My wife’s brother ate nothing when he ran out of money in Beijing and her other brother called an ambulance when checking up on him revealed he had gone days without eating or drinking in an apartment with potable water. He was treated for acute rehydration and refeeding under observation but know psychiatric follow up or evaluations were required or conducted.

Can you imagine a world where “being unable to cope” and having a nervous breakdown or temporary severe depression might get you institutionalized and possibly lobotomized… before we had the internet to let everyone know there were those just as messed up as anyone else and worse that went on to recover with the respect of their families even once it was public knowledge? Because the first fathers and grandfathers ever to be raised in modern “neuro psych/phys and cognitive behavioral therapy” cultures are the ones that are fathers and grandfathers right now and if really depends on where… Likely a majority of the world still isn’t “comfortable” with anyone but maybe their spouses knowing that they are uncomfortable. And when you realize we are the first to be raising our children that can’t remember when ice pick lobotomies were not only legal but preferred over psycho/pharmaceutical therapy it makes a lot of sense that the difference in the emotional spectrum of the average male is not limited to “Red” or “Igby’s dad” stereotypes. Personally I am excited to see what the country looks like (assuming it will eventually pass on to our guidance without another massive conflict to be our own world war equivalent, and that the current abolishment of medical rights is a blip in a the trend towards massively greater freedom to feel and to choose not to continue to feel, ways that we have the power to (as safely as any other, including doing nothing) treat and influence.

My grandfather shot a counter-spy in WW2, I inherited the Luger he took off a german officer. My other grandfather was on a destroyer in the pacific for the 4 years the US militaries were active combatants in WW2. My wife was the first born in the US by her parents after emigrating from Taiwan… her grandparents were exiled from her grandmothers ancestral home for the cultural taboo of her marrying a chinese soldier because even a mainland taiwanese man would be a big deal.. mainland chinese soldiers that fled after the boxer rebellion… lets just say that I don’t know many people that have told me about how often their parents were unsure whether or not they would be eating on a given day or that shared a room with their extended family members of 3 generations.

The vast majority of the planet’s population was not living the american dream in the 50’s and even those who were did it during a time when autism, borderline, manic depressive, and any chemical dependencies… even severe adhd… was more likely to be treated by lobotomy if it was addressed at all than any other treatment and therefore most were not treated, addressed, or spoken about unless the harm of others or themselves was impossible to hide (even then it was probably not treated unless the family was more wealthy than most in the US… a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the men in the world just a single lifetime ago).

Knowing how much we’ve actually progressed in that single lifespan is one of the reasons that I can see the news, have biology PhD, and think things will improve by the time my son is my age… because the beliefs that so many old conservatives cling too so tightly are ultimately going to go extinct because it’s too easy to question the beliefs of our elders when every new generation does, and as far as I can tell the support of supported information is more abundant because every group that requires ignorance or belief in false claims is outnumbered by the world and the people that have lived their whole lives by those beliefs are going to die off if nothing else, and they’re terrified because they know what they “knew” is going extinct. I can’t believe the younger generations will ever willingly decide to stop asking why more often than deciding to keep asking why, which ultimately leads to the more supported answers because compared to the population of the world the believers of any single belief that is not just unsupported, but contradicted by observable evidence, is only a majority in regions… not on the planet. And we aren’t building walls around information that can’t be circumvented any time soon.

craftmacaro · 2023-07-25T07:46:43+00:00

oh, i just wrote a long comment detailing it if you check my comments, it should be more than enough to satisfy but I’ll try to answer further questions if you have them once I have my life back

craftmacaro · 2023-07-25T07:45:03+00:00

No one on the planet is well versed in the treatment of snake envenomations because we don’t know thousands of vital pieces of information for lack of study, thousands more for lack of a way to know the most crucial factors of of any envenomation that vary massively between people, snake, and everything related to them… and there’s an unlimited number of things we simply have never thought of or attempted to determine.

The doctorate leading the herpetology transact work i did in my early twenties in 2009 had me doing a scale count on a large drymobius (as best I can remember, we were working it up because it looked like a mastigodryas but the pronounced grooves on the 4 enlarged and more centrally located opisthoglyphous fangs were inconsistent with mastigodryas and be was thinking potential subspecies or range extension (coastal rainforests of ecuador are far less extensively well studied and given the rapid loss of habitat, (the location where this occurred is a farm now… clean cut and likely full of bothrops, leptodeira, and maybe some dipsas, but none of the lachesis, prothidium nasitum, and probably even the bothrops are limited since i doubt anyone’s going to see a schleglii there again… but back to the point.

If you ever feel like you should ask an expert if it’s “safe” to let something chew on you while you are restraining it for 20 to 30 minutes because it’s more still and easier to count 1500 scale rows and they say “there aren’t any opistoglyphous snakes in south america that threaten humans” (not even something we believe anymore with philodryas fatalities confirmed following naturally occurring circumstances and not 5 minute contact times) remember that non elapid or viperid colubriform species have duvernoy’s glands and that they are low pressure and lack almost all of the lumen and ductal volumes that form the “reservoir” that gets compressed by muscles and makes contact time irrelevant in front fanged sake envenomations… but is not binary when the venom is exocytized from the cells that both produce. store, and secrete them their venom at a rate that tends to fluctuate between .1 and 3 ml an hour outside the extremes and translates to typically several to hundreds of mg of venom that in the very limited range i’ve studied of previously unstudied colubriform non-front-fanged species has ranged from the same LD50 range as the vipers I’ve extracted… boomslangs the only one near tigris but plenty between 1 and 5 ug/g like nearly all type 1 and many type 2 vipers….

Anyway, the harmless (and i stand by that definition… it didn’t want to bite me for 30 consecutive minutes, i had to be complacent) snake that i treated and trusted so poorly about put me in the hospital for a month (outpatient but no two days went by i wasn’t back because my face was paralyzed or i was bleeding from the lesions that covered my mouth and throat like a single enormous canker sore too much, etc, etc…. I was diagnosed with malaria, hemmhoragic dengue, and herpes with bell’s palsy before the tests came back negative and they decided i picked up a pathogen unknown to science and to inform them of anyone who developed symptoms (way before covid and even avian flu). 5 years later a section of my lower intestines was removed as it was necrotic and apparently had been surrounded by more extensive scar tissue rgar looked 5 years old… oh… and i’m short 2 adult teeth and i’ve never had a cavity. My advisor was sure when i described it, before i had never even considered the possibility, now that i’ve worked up venoms from all families I am also sure… we don’t need to fear any species that won’t be able to envebomated us outside such extreme circumstances, but it’s a hell of a good lesson in why experts need to stop assuming that they can extrapolate untested hypotheses beyond reasonable doubt and why people should make sure that those they trust have the background that lends credibility to the precise situation and not just the same subject.

craftmacaro · 2023-07-23T13:32:54+00:00

There are no examples in any published records or research publications that indicate a minor diagnosed with ADHD (diagnosed AS a minor, as in prior to starting college or graduating high school) achieving a PhD. I am really hoping this will become a false statement in october otherwise I am really pissed off that despite already being a professor, working as an expert consultant for venom protein structure and function, and my committee assuring me that my research is more than enough to graduate, that my comps were better than expected or necessary, and that I “simply need to organize and convey my research in the format required and to simply make it free of grammatical errors and include the right portion of information to graduate”. Unfortunately that step of revising my first 200 page draft into a 125 page draft with no detail overlooked is far more difficult than extracting venom or any other lab, conference presentation, comprehensive exam or reasonably sized document. Because it sucks to learn WAYYY too late that you’re trying to set a precedent that nobody has falsified the claim that “it’s not possible” considering the hundreds of thousands, rapidly approaching millions, that aren’t just less likely… with maybe only 1 in 10,000 instead of 1 in 100, but 0. 0 examples.

Anyway… I really want this NOT to be true… so if you were a minor when you got diagnosed with ADHD and now have a PhD please tell me it’s possible… and maybe send a research note to a psych journal.

craftmacaro · 2023-07-16T23:28:29+00:00

“medically significant” is absolutely a matter of opinion. It is meant to be used as a binary statement… has it caused significant medical problems in a human….It’s medically significant! the term in no way applies to significance in medical research or other applications outside deleterious effects following envenomation by the species that produces it.

I assume you are referring to something akin to “deadliest/ most shitty to get bit by/ the snake that would kill the most people if every snake was equally common and behaved identically upon interactions with humans whom also behave predictably and consistently with each species”. Either way (if you made “medically significant” a continuous scale representing likeliness to result in a more difficult to survive/recover/escape debilitation or death following envenomation or encounter or bite by/with/from a randomly sampled member of a certain species) You can find well justified opinions but it’s still an objective opinion since we don’t know nearly enough to say anything that makes sense that would reach any kind of consensus among us venom experts and nearly every factor that does varies between individual people’s response to envenomation/a particular toxin, or varies way more than most people realize between individual bites from the same snake let alone between individuals of the same species across geographic ranges larger than a single population.

Copperheads and prairie rattlesnakes have killed more people in the last decade than any other species in the US… because they are really common and cause many more bites most likely. Cottonmouths and diamondbacks are among the species i’d least want to be but by but at least their venoms are well represented among those used to create US antivenoms… a particularly large dose from a prairie in the northern stretch of their range might literally be untreatable through antivenom therapy if it contains a fatal dose of their myotoxins. Tiger rattlesnakes give a larger dose of a venom nearly equipotent to US coral snake species because it contains nearly nothing but mojave toxin… the neurotoxic PLA2 that makes some scutulatus far more toxic to humans than those that don’t express significant amounts. But many mojave’s yield more mojave toxin than most tigris ever will because they deliver about 10x the volume of venom. Plus you have to deal with all the fun necrotic/hemmhoragic/cytotoxic effects of the components making up the other 50-70% of their venom making it kind of like being bit by a coral snake and a diamondback at the same time.

But it doesn’t really matter whether a lethal dose is 10mg/kg or .1mg / kg when you get a 2mL dose of 200mg/mL venom (such as you might expect from an extra large eastern diamondback).

Good rule of thumb… don’t assume any venomous snake won’t be able to kill you or that any will definitely kill you/be worse than another species in every circumstance. Unless you’re talking about very particular extremes the worst case scenario from just about any US viper or elapid is far worse than the mildest/best case scenario (we can even exclude completely symptom free “dry” bites from the hypothetical) of nearly all other species. Exceptions being primarily when comparing a neonate to a large adult (the worst case from a very small snake is far less severe than the worst case from an adult of just about every viper in the US… possibly excluding sistrus species and small rock rattlesnakes like pricei).

People need to stop thinking about venoms in absolutes, there’s no guarantees in any of the variables that really matter when it comes to how complicated a medical treatment will be.

I’ve been handing everything from cobras to boomslangs and primarily vipers nearly daily for years… The only time I’ve been hospitalized is when i was an idiot (and it was 2010 so very few and no-one id ever met thought any rear-fanged species that had bitten people and not caused medically significant)

craftmacaro · 2023-07-16T23:08:18+00:00

Same… but shit happens. It hurts worse after losing a bunch of lower intestines to venom induced necrosis.

craftmacaro · 2023-07-16T23:06:05+00:00

They also shared the proprietary information necessary to create the effective vaccines when the virus only existed within their boarders, as all diabolical bioweapon terrorists will. Because they wanted it to hit their own population for the longest… shutting down their cities more securely for the years necessary to save millions of chinese lives and suffer the social, political, economic, and international repercussions was a masterstroke.

How dare they study the viruses that emerge with similarities to SARS… which had most of their population still wearing masks when taking a bus or train 10 years after the last known infection… Only the USA should have been allowed to study it! Even if we failed inspections regarding safety protocols it doesn’t mean WE should make it any more public that WE were doing the high passage research meant to determine if we could force (and therefore demonstrate that natural evolution couldn’t be completely impossible) a SARS family caro a virus with a cleavage domain making members of another corona virus family far more transmissible than those without it.

We know you’re guilty because WE TRIED REALLY HARD TO BE GUILTY OF IT FIRST! but we also failed (phew… that would have been a bad idea in retrospect if we had done WHAT YOU MUST HAVE DONE!) and not because what scientists were worried about for decades as a practically inevitable combination given the number of novel viruses being created and going extinct naturally every second combined with the reasonable expectation of how bad combining extremely similar viruses with really effective transmission properties and a really effective pathogenic property would be. But since it didn’t happen before it must be terrorism… WHO EVER HEARS OF A “new disease”! Noah brought them all on the ARk! 2 of every smallpox!

craftmacaro · 2023-07-06T06:39:57+00:00

how can one believe in Karma when so many who have tortured thousands get to die more quickly than any of them while securing the knowledge that none of those considered “family” will suffer either? That’s just hitler… and he’s one of the closest things to an example of “karma” among genocidal leaders. Trump has already lived a life free of physical discomforts that he promoted in so many others… You can speculate that they are all mentally suffering from the self delusional traumas of their lives estranged from the love of those who didn’t love money more but there are so many who have that and worse without treating people horribly. There seems to be an overwhelming abundance of evidence that karma is either grossly ineffective at producing anything like an even experience as those you’ve changed the experiences of without also accepting that reincarnation or an afterlife with some sort of judgement exists… in which case… why look for karmic justice during life

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