by Evan Antin
I was in heaven.
One of the first creatures you notice when you hike in the Darién is a particular species of poison dart frog. They congregate everywhere—near the edges of rivers, in creek beds, and even in puddles. I never found anything in the creek near the house in Kansas where I grew up that could hold a candle to these little gems. Their coloring is glowing green and jet black, swirled into a gorgeous marbled pattern. Their skin sparkles, and the sun glints off it. It would be tempting, seeing one of these little amphibians in the wild, to scoop it up because it’s so pretty you want a closer look. Just keep in mind that this kind of frog comes equipped with enough poison in the skin covering its tiny body to stop a human heart. Indigenous people in Central and South America once coated the tips of their arrows and spears with this poison to make them more deadly—that’s where these guys get their name. Despite their deadly history, if you handle these frogs gently and respectfully and don’t have any open wounds, they generally won’t hurt you.
Honestly, my big concern in Panama wasn’t whether one of these beautiful little creatures might harm me; it was whether I might crush one of them—or an entire family—under my boots. They were everywhere. In some areas the ground was teeming with them. This is a species I’d hoped to see in the jungle, but not one I’d ever imagined I would encounter by the thousands.
If you’re a frog fan, you probably know that most species lay large quantities of eggs, then leave them to mature into tadpoles and adults on their own. The way poison dart frogs raise their young is completely different. These frogs lay only a few eggs at a time, then guard them until they hatch. Once the tadpoles emerge, one of their parents carries them on its back for days, bringing them into the trees and to water until they start to mature. Which parent is the carrier depends on the particular species of poison dart frog—but in the case of the green-and-black frogs I was seeing, it’s the dad who hangs around, waits for the little buggers to climb on, and then totes them around to ensure they get what they need.
One more fascinating fact about the poison dart frog is that when they are bred in captivity—or even kept in captivity over long periods of time—they’re no longer poisonous. Turns out their bodies are able to generate and maintain their toxins only when they can get certain chemicals from the insects they eat in the wild.
At the end of every day in the Darién, the name of the game was getting some of the jungle grime off me and trying to cool down enough to sleep. In the evenings I trekked to a creek close to camp for a quick rinse. On the second night, while I was still at the shore, I spotted a river otter about seventy feet downstream. I had come up cautiously, watching for snakes, trying not to step on any poison frogs, eyes peeled for any wildlife—or any dangers—I might miss if I rushed. The otter didn’t seem to have a care in the world. He was flipping around, splashing and playing, a blur of sleek brown fur in the water. Unlike some of their relatives who live in close-knit families—and completely unlike the comparably carefree sea lions I’d met in the Galápagos—neotropical river otters in Central and South America live mostly solitary lives. It’s actually pretty rare to spot one, and as I stood there, completely still, I knew I was lucky to have the chance.
These otters are extremely self-sufficient and highly effective predators. In fact, they’re one of only a few species of animals who feed themselves largely through the unlikely skill of out-swimming fish. It’s true. These guys choose their prey, then stalk it through the water, eventually picking up the pace until they overtake it. Most fish can swim fast in the short term but can’t maintain their speed for long. These river otters, on the other hand, are such accomplished swimmers and have such a fast metabolism (typically 50 percent higher than an active and comparably sized land mammal) that they can keep up almost indefinitely, even while taking quick sips of air.
Once they catch their prey, otters like the one I was watching waste nothing, eating most species skin, bones, and all, to derive as much nutrition as possible from their conquests.
I started to creep down the shoreline, hoping to get a closer look, but the otter heard me coming, dove under the water, and ghosted me before I could even travel a few feet.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the local river otters, who supplement their pescatarian diets with reptiles and amphibians, ever accidentally ingest the poison frogs. After all, there were hundreds of the little toxic bombs near the creek the otter and I were enjoying, just hanging around and looking an awful lot like free food.
The answer, I learned, is a fun one. Even though river otters don’t typically eat poison dart frogs, research has found that when food is scarce, otters do consume even poisonous amphibians without suffering any harm. How do they get away with it?
They skin them.
Mother Nature never ceases to blow my mind.
Once Bitten
I can’t really share any more of my adventures with the snakes of Panama or anywhere else without confessing that when I was a teenager, I took a serious bite. I was seventeen and still living at home in Kansas when I caught my first venomous snake, a copperhead. She was all the colors of the autumn leaves around her, with a wide, diamond-shaped head defined by the deep heat-sensing pits behind her nostrils. I knew this snake was venomous, but that just made me more fascinated. I wrangled her with a “custom” snake hook I’d built out of a copper pipe epoxied to a rubber-coated bicycle hanger, gently hooking under her belly, then moving her to an open space where I could snap away with my camera.
When the photo shoot was finished, I should have walked away and been grateful for the encounter. But I wasn’t that smart or considerate yet, so I popped that beautiful copperhead into the duffel bag I usually used for my lacrosse gear and took her home.
It was a bad idea on so many levels. This was a venomous wild snake. Strike 1.
A snake that did not belong to me (or anyone). Strike 2.
I knew I couldn’t keep her, but I was having a hard time saying good-bye, so I set up a “habitat” in a terrarium next to my bed and watched my new pet until I fell asleep. The minute daylight broke through the window, I was back in caretaker mode. Over the next couple days, the snake was my main focus. When I fed her, she ate pretty well, and that quieted the voice in my head that kept telling me she deserved a lot better than a glass box in my bedroom.
After a week, it looked like she might shed soon, so I moved “my” copperhead to the bathroom sink to soak her scales and facilitate the process. Up until that point she’d been mellow—so mellow that for a moment I let my guard down. I was just admiring her, hands off. I leaned in close, my hook not even in play.
And that’s when she sprang up and bit my nose. Strike 3.
For a split second I hoped it had been a dry bite—one that doesn’t inject venom—but almost instantly I realized that I hadn’t been that lucky. I felt my nose inflating like a balloon, getting harder and fuller by the second. From there the pressure spread toward my mouth, cheeks, and eyes.
This was a moment I would replay in my head a thousand times, wishing I’d been smarter or more careful or both, but right then, I went straight into fight-or-flight mode, placing the snake back in the enclosure, racing through the house, jumping into the car, and speeding to the hospital. I drove so fast that what should have been a fifteen-minute drive took about six. I was lucky I didn’t get a ticket on my newly minted driver’s license.
I careened into the parking lot, abandoned the car in a loading zone, raced through the sliding doors of the ER, and rushed the attendant at the counter. “I’ve been bit by a copperhead,” I stammered. Then—just in case there was any question about what had to happen next: “I need anti-venom right now. Immediately.”
To the hospital’s credit, nobody asked me to take a seat or a number or to wait my turn. The ER team swung into action—and quickly determined that they didn’t have the anti-venom I needed. I was freaking out, but the staff stayed cool, loading me into an ambulance to transfer me to a second hospital
while they called ahead to make sure I got treatment ASAP on arrival.
Luckily, when it comes to potency, copperheads are one of the least “hot” of all pit vipers. If I’d been bitten by a coral snake or a rattlesnake, it might have killed me or permanently wrecked my face. Copperhead venom is a little less potent, and that bought me enough time to get treatment.
Of course, I still had a different kind of reckoning coming. After the hospital dosed me with four vials of anti-venom through fast-acting IV push injections, they admitted me—and called my mom.
I was coming off the adrenaline surge that had gotten me from bite to treatment and realizing my panic had been masking a world of pain when she arrived. My face was swollen and hard, burning deep beneath the skin. It must have looked as bad as it felt, because my mother’s face contorted in horror with her first glimpse of my poor disfigured head. Every few minutes a doctor or nurse had been coming in to check my breathing, and soon I heard one of them explaining to my mom that they were doing it because I wasn’t in the clear yet. The inflammatory reaction to the venom could still close my throat. I know now they could have managed that with a tracheotomy, but in that moment as I was lying there, in excruciating pain, I thought, If I can’t breathe, I can’t live!
It was the last straw. After more than two hours in full-on fight-or-flight mode, I was done. First I puked. Then I passed out.
Not my finest hour.
I woke up much later, still traumatized but no longer in pain, thanks to the miracle of morphine.
Although I had loved and been fascinated by snakes ever since I was a little kid, that’s the day I learned that if I really wanted to continue to engage with these magnificent and quietly powerful creatures, I’d better start giving them their due respect.
In a messed-up way, the entire incident was probably a blessing. I had found out the hard way that wild animals are always wild. Since that day, I’ve put myself in many situations where I’m at the mercy of a wild animal (many of them far deadlier than a North American copperhead), but I never forget what they’re capable of, and I never allow myself to be complacent.
Sometimes I think someone was looking over me that day—luck hardly seems like enough to explain how I walked away from such a nasty bite with just a little warp on the left side of my nose and a wounded ego.
Hot, Hot Herp
I tell you the story about how I got bit by that copperhead to provide a little context for what happened next in the Darién Gap.
Eduardo and I were carving our way through the jungle, looking in, on, and under the trees for creatures I could photograph and film, when we spotted possibly the most gorgeous snake in the world stretched out right in the middle of a rare open spot. The sun was reflecting off its bright orangey-red skin like a neon sign flashing, EVAN, OVER HERE! It was a coral snake, and a spectacular one.
Coral snakes have what’s known as aposematic coloring—bright, bold colors that are meant to serve as a warning to other wildlife. Predators tend to take a beat before engaging with anything that looks exotic, bright, or different from their usual meal. Even in the animal kingdom there are unspoken rules about some things being just too weird to eat.
Of course to me, the coloring wasn’t off-putting at all. It was gorgeous. So much of what you see in the jungle is green and brown, and here was a creature so shiny it looked like its gleaming bright red and yellow bands had just been polished. This one was slithering across the trail in front of us—three feet long, slender, shimmering, beautiful.
If you’re like me, you grew up hearing an easy-to-remember adage meant to keep you from picking up a coral snake that might kill you. “Red on black, friend of Jack,” maybe, or “Red on yellow kills a fellow.” In Central and South America, following that guideline is a good way to get killed. Nature does not like to be overly predictable, and the snake in my path in one of the wildest jungles in the world had wide red and black stripe pairings (in addition to the narrow bands of yellow) but was definitely no friend of Jack. It was actually a textbook example of the most venomous snake in that part of the world. It was also, at that point, the single most potentially lethal snake I’d ever seen in the wild.
It was not, however, the most dangerous. Just because a snake can kill you doesn’t mean it’ll be in the mood to. Coral snakes can be nasty if they want to, but generally speaking that’s not their nature. It’s rare for even wild specimens to strike. This snake was remarkably chill as I hooked him under his body and grasped his tail. I would not be wrapping this beauty around my arm, the way I often do with nonvenomous species. If you have a snake anchored around your arm and it gets pissed, you can’t immediately let go. Anytime a venomous snake is involved, you don’t want to put yourself in a position where you could find yourself trying to get it off you.
Holding this snake at all was surprisingly challenging. If you need to control a viper, you can grip it at the base behind that great big head. It’s like a handle, wide and curving out from the back of the head, keeping your hand out of reach of the fangs. Coral snakes, which are not vipers, tend to be skinny, with narrow heads that rarely exceed their body width. There’s nothing to hold there. If a viper wants to back out on you, it can’t slip back past your hand. If a coral snake wants to slide back, it’s much tougher to control. To make matters worse, the coral snake has thin, smooth scales—so smooth they feel slippery just from the oils of your hands. Vipers have rougher, keeled scales that provide some friction and traction for your grip.
So standing there holding the coral snake, I was incredibly excited, but also terrified. This moment was a high point in my trek across the Darién. There I was, on a steep jungle mountain, dozens of miles from the nearest town and even farther from a hospital. It was just my guide and me, and since I was easily a foot taller than him and outweighed him by at least eighty pounds, it was a safe bet he wouldn’t be carrying me to safety. If I got bitten, I wouldn’t have a chance. I knew it would go quickly—the neurotoxin in coral snake venom makes you feel super-wasted, super-fast. First you’re nauseous, then you faint, then you’re unconscious. What actually kills you is when it stops your diaphragm from contracting. Once again, no breath means no life.
But I was twenty-five, and I felt invincible. This trip was my last hurrah before hunkering down with my books for vet school. I was so hungry for the moment that there was no way fear was going to stop me. I was committed to having the experience, and equally committed to documenting it so that my holding this snake might contribute to a better understanding of it. I knew the footage would not be nearly as compelling if I were just standing next to the snake in the shot.
My heartbeat might have been pounding out, Don’t bite, don’t bite, don’t bite, but my conscious thoughts were on something that seemed even more urgent: teaching my guide how to use my damn cameras.
I have no idea why I hadn’t given him a lesson ahead of time, why I hadn’t taken the time to teach him what to do when a big moment comes along. But I hadn’t. So I was standing there holding a snake that could kill me at any second, with both of my hands decidedly occupied as I tried to coach Eduardo through setting up a tripod and camera, using a half click to focus and a full click to shoot (“half click” is not one of the handy phrases in my Spanish arsenal), how to look through the view window, how to make sure the snake and I were both in the shot. Eduardo kept glancing from me to the snake, and as cool as he’d been talking his way past armed soldiers, he was not cool in that moment. He was kind of freaking out. When I leaned in to show him how to adjust the camera, his eyes went wide. He leaned back as far as a man can without falling over, maintaining a steady distance between himself and the snake. He was hesitant to touch the cameras, and the confidence he’d shown the whole time we’d been together faltered when he had them in his hands. Suddenly the guy who could walk through the jungle like he owned it was unsure.
It was terrible timing, but the snake was remarkably tolerant, waiting for us to settle down and figure out how to do
this together.
Finally we had a couple still photos and the camera running, and the mellow, deadly fellow and I stepped in front of it to record a short video. I explained that there are more than a dozen different types of coral snakes and their impersonators in Central and South America, and that the one in my hands was the real deal. There are a few guidelines for determining whether a snake that looks kinda sorta like a coral snake might actually be venomous, I said—for instance, the pattern on its skin, the length of its tail (for most people an entire snake may look like a tail, but in this case it’s the distance from the vent on an animal’s abdomen to the end of its body), and the size of its eyes (big eyes usually mean nonvenomous, whereas small eyes more often indicate that a snake is venomous). The thing is, though, you really don’t want to get close enough to look deep into the eyes of a snake if it even might be a coral. Generally speaking, I concluded (while starting to wonder if I should be taking my own advice as the snake got restless), it’s best to admire these beautiful creatures from a distance.
And with that I gently lowered the coral snake to the ground and stepped back to admire his departure. I was torn between relief at being out of danger and regret that our encounter—something I felt like I’d waited my whole life for—was over.
After the Gap
Eduardo and I emerged from the Darién seven days after beginning the trek. I was dirty, hungry, and exhausted, both mentally and physically—but also as elated as I’d ever felt in my life. Few places on earth are that completely wild, and I knew that if I hadn’t gone into that jungle with the most wily, rugged, kick-ass guide ever, I might not have made it out. Eduardo was my savior, and as I paid him and shook his hand (and tipped him as generously as a broke pre-vet student possibly could), there were not enough rounds of Muchas gracias in the world to thank him for the experience I’d just had.
