FEBRUARY MARCH 1999 
STORIES
FSU's TRIPLE ALUM KNOWS THE SECRET OF SNAKES
By Nancy Cook Lauer
FSU Communications Group
Ever seen life through "snake eyes?" Heat is light. Dinner is a rat-shaped flare gliding through a thick gray fog. Foes are gigantic glowing forms that might step on you - or even eat you - if you're not careful.
Welcome to the weird world of the eastern diamondback rattler, as seen through the infrared pits located just below its eyes. While many - with good reason - shun the deadly reptiles, they're an essential part of the local ecology, and important research subjects for biologist D. Bruce Means.
"It's an entirely different perspective," Means said. "Their heat-sensing pits are extremely sensitive. Their food items stand out like beacons."
With his bachelor's (1968), master's (1972) and doctoral (1975) degrees from Florida State, Means calls himself a "triple alum." He's also an adjunct professor at FSU, teaching wetlands ecology; an environmental tour guide for groups traveling to such far-flung places as Botswana; and a consultant with his research center, Coastal Plains Institute.
Though he's an expert on many species of reptiles and amphibians, Means started studying rattlers early in his career and has fallen in love with the often unpopular animal.
"I'll probably go to my grave being the snake man," Means acknowledged. "But that's not really all that I'm about."
Now he's putting together an hour-long documentary under contract with National Geographic Television Inc.
The show, currently slated to be the opening program in October of the planned National Geographic Explorer Channel, will feature the first televised look at how a snake perceives the world, Means said. He and producer David Wright are using special military equipment to simulate the snake's world.
"It's the first-ever show using a very expensive high-tech infrared camera to try to show an audience what it would be like to experience life through the infrared pits of a snake," Means said.
The biologist hopes to dispel popular misconceptions and teach a few interesting facts about his favorite animal, which has almost been the death of him, not just once, but twice. Although snake bites about 10 years apart have sent the biologist into intensive care, he still defends the stealthy critters. It was, after all, his own fault he was bitten, as he had been picking them up.
It's no coincidence that most snake bites occur on the hand.
In fact, he points out, only six to 10 people die each year from snake bites - a small fraction of the number who get struck by lightning.
Eastern diamondback rattlers are one species of snake in particular that would rather flee than fight.
That's not to say that the rattler's venom isn't potent. A bite from a diamondback can cause nerve paralysis within minutes, bringing a grown man to his knees and clouding thinking. For smaller prey the snake doesn't have far to travel to find his victim once he bites it and knocks it out. The venom also breaks down the meat for digestion.
Other misperceptions are the notions that mother rattlers swallow their young to protect them and that snakes hypnotize their prey.
Means thinks someone who has killed a rattlesnake may have seen young snakes crawl out of the dead snake's mouth. That could happen, because snakes bear their young live, but only if the babies were about to be born anyway, and the mother's internal organs were so badly damaged the babies could escape only that way, Means said.
The flickering tongue isn't meant to hypnotize either, but to aid in the sense of smell.
The snakes' reproductive organs are uniquely designed for their habits as well. The female rattlesnake does not have oviducts that join to form a uterus, but two unjoined oviducts instead. The male, in turn, has a two-part hemipenis that connects with the female sort of like an electrical outlet. The male has two sets of these, so he can couple whether he approaches from the right or the left.
After about 12 months, the young are born live. They're about 14 inches long when they uncoil from their birth sacs, and leave the mother within 24 hours to strike off on their own.
The eastern diamondback rattlesnake is the largest of its family, growing up to 7 feet long and up to 15 pounds.
The snake once inhabited the long-leaf-pine forests that covered the coastal plains of the eastern United States, but their number has dwindled along with the habitat, and today they live in isolated pockets like the Apalachicola National Forest.
Means' fascination with snakes started soon after he moved to Tallahassee to work on his bachelor's degree at Florida State. Coming from Anchorage, Alaska, where there are no snakes, Means had no natural fear of them, just an intense curiosity.
"North Florida in the vicinity of Tallahassee fortuitously happens to be the area having the highest species richness of snakes on the continent north of Mexico, with 47 species," Means said.
In the mid-1970s, Means worked at Tall Timbers Research Station north of Tallahassee, where he got the snakes to swallow radio transmitters so he could track their movements.
Means' treatise details how one snake crawled more than 6,000 yards during a single year, moving mainly from stump hole to stump hole, resting between treks in sunny spots.
The National Geographic television show features a year in the life of an eastern diamondback rattler and shows how the snake peacefully coexists in a gopher tortoise hole along with the tortoise, a frog and a nearby - but not too close - family of mice.
Along with the "snake's eye" look at the world, viewers will see the snake star in scenes of slithering courtship and mating, feeding on a myriad of animals and fleeing forest fires and floods.
Some of the scenes are staged in the studio in a mockup of a gopher tortoise tunnel, but all remain true to life, Means said.
The exception? Producer Wright has a soft spot about throwing the rattlers live animals, so the feeding scenes are faked with road kill.
"We used lots of road kill," Means laughed. "I'd be driving my truck around town and, when we passed a freshly-killed squirrel, I'd slam on the brakes, hop out of the cab, pick it up and throw it in the back. People looked at me kind of oddly."
Well, that's show biz.