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Big Snake & Other XL Creatures

lazarus

By lazarus
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Kathmandu Contributor

Kathmandu

Posted
Posted (edited)
20 hours ago, lazarus said:

Will make a lot of neck ties... 🐍

92 rattlesnakes retrieved from under Santa Rosa homerawImage.jpg

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/92-rattlesnakes-retrieved-from-under-Santa-Rosa-16531448.php

The leader of a Bay Area reptile rescue retrieved 92 Northern Pacific rattlesnakes from underneath a Santa Rosa home in early October.

Al Wolf, the director of the Sonoma County Reptile Rescue who has been rescuing snakes and other reptiles for the past 32 years through his nonprofit, responded on Oct. 2 to a resident’s call about a rattlesnake den underneath her home, located in the northeast section of Santa Rosa on the Mayacamas Mountains.

After finding an adult rattlesnake and several rattlesnake babies within just a couple minutes of dropping beneath the home — and after getting a whiff of the unmistakable, “special smell” of rattlesnake defecation — Wolf went to his car to retrieve more tools. He returned to the dark underbelly of the residence with two, red five-gallon buckets, a snake-grabber tool and slipped thick Hexarmor safety gloves over his hands.

One bucket was for baby snakes and small snakes, and the other bucket was for adult snakes....

 

A million $$$ home up there in Mayacamas no doubt. Evidently the snakes are complimentary...no extra charge.

Update: the snakes are freaking out. As righties, they prefer to be re-located in the@Krapowaward winning garden. 

Edited by Kathmandu
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fygjam
fygjam

As we say in Australia when it comes to crocs. "That's not a frying pan". "That's a frying pan".  

lazarus
lazarus
forqalso
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ItemFix-dot-com-kitty_1704129741.mp4.6592fa5d47475.mp4    

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fygjam Proficient

fygjam

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Experts warn of surge in funnel-web spiders following heavy rain

A massive funnel-web spider with fangs that could puncture a fingernail has been reported amid a creepy-crawly surge.

The Australian Reptile Park has captured its largest funnel-web spider with huge fangs
capable of puncturing a fingernail.

The beast, dubbed by staff as a “megaspider”, has fangs almost 2cm long and was
reported amid a surge in the number of creepy-crawlies thriving in wet and humid
conditions in NSW.

Keeper Jake Meney said the heavy rain on the east coast had led to an “influx” of the
creatures, which he warned were “very active”.

“This female funnel-web spider is over 8cm in length and the average funnel-webs are
typically less than five, so this spider is quite a bit larger than typical,” he said.

“Even a normal-sized funnel-web has extremely large fangs, but on this megaspider, the
fangs are almost 2cm long, which is longer than a taipan fang, and that's capable of
puncturing a human fingernail.”

Yeah, nah, no thanks.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/experts-warn-of-surge-in-funnelweb-spiders-following-heavy-rain/news-story/8e6494c17522ae3f1766276bfd581ab5

 

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forcebwithu Mentor

forcebwithu

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29 minutes ago, lazarus said:

Radio controlled..? Methinks not.

Croc's are definitely real. Don't know about the inked up idiot guy taking photos from the water's edge though. To be that stupid there's got to be nothing left between the ears controlling his body, so he's probably radio controlled. 

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Glasseye Mentor

Glasseye

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Yikes ! Not big, but four inches is big enough for the "Deathstalker" scorpion.

 

This reminds me of the time years back when I was sitting in the backroom at my buddies house in a hilly area outside of the city San Jose, Costa Rica....

I was sitting there enjoying the scenery with beer in hand when something fell in front of me from the ceiling, hitting the floor with a noticeable thud. I looked down  and it was a rather large scorpion. Just about shit myself.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/world/middleeast/scorpions-egypt.html

 

Plagues Strike Egypt: Sudden Floods, Then 4-Inch Scorpions Called Deathstalkers

Swept from desert burrows, hundreds, if not thousands, of scorpions skittered into villages, stinging at least 503 people.

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merlin_180932124_bebed885-db71-4974-bf6c

 

Scorpions that were hunted on Egyptian deserts and shores in 2020.Credit...Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters

CAIRO — First came the lightning that strobe-lit the Nile skies a pale purply gray. What happened next checked all the boxes for a fierce storm: heavy rain, thunder and flash flooding that sent people scurrying for dry land and crumbled mud-brick houses around Aswan, the largest city in southern Egypt.

Then came the scorpions.

There were hundreds, if not thousands: yellowish four-inchers with as many as six pairs of eyes and a tail full of venom so toxic that the species is known, unscientifically, as the deathstalker.

Swept from their desert burrows by the rains, they came skittering into mountainside villages and burst into homes through cracks in the walls, stinging at least 503 people on Friday night alone, according to local officials.

“The floods in the villages of Aswan forced the scorpions out of their hide-outs, and they stung some people,” the administrator of a Facebook page dedicated to community news, Nubia, lamented after the waters had subsided. “O Allah, protect the land.”

In the final analysis, the storm that detonated over Aswan with biblical fury at about 9:30 p.m. on Friday inflicted its worst damage with flooding: Three people died, and local officials said 103 homes were partly or fully destroyed, though residents said the real toll was far greater.

On Monday, thousands of people were still doubling up with neighbors or sleeping outside as they tried to salvage whatever they could from the rubble. In a show of discontent rare for Egypt, where most dissent is suppressed by security forces, roughly a dozen protesters demonstrated in front of the Aswan governor’s office on Monday over the lack of electricity, water or any government assistance.

But it was the plague of scorpions that turned heads far from Aswan, a few hours south of the ancient temples of Luxor, where the Nileside pace of life is nonchalant, the small pastel-painted villages ramshackle and the weather dry — until Friday night.

With its vast deserts, Egypt is normally heaven for scorpions, 24 species in all, which make their homes in desert burrows or under rocks and can survive for weeks on end with no food or water. They are such longtime inhabitants of the country that two ancient kings borrowed their names, and the ancient goddess Isis was said to have escaped danger with the help of seven scorpions, who also took the form of a goddess, Serket, in Egyptian mythology.

Friday’s heavy rains proved a less hospitable environment than usual. Scorpion experts said the flooding in Aswan had probably driven them from the mountainous desert that surrounds the area and into the villages.

Deathstalker scorpions — or, as they are known to scientists, Leiurus quinquestriatus — are part of daily life for Aswanis, especially in the summer, when scorpions tend to be more active. They scamper the streets, lurk under stones and trespass homes, nestling in shoes and beneath blankets.

Dozens of scorpion stings are reported in the area each year. If stung, everyone knows, a trip to the hospital for a shot of antivenom and a few days’ recovery will take care of it.

“We’re just used to it,” said Islam Mohamed, who pilots one of the many small boats that drift down the Nile around Aswan, ferrying people from place to place. “We just hit them with something when we see them.”

Still, 503 bites in one night is unheard-of. Hospitals around Aswan were forced to dig into their antivenom stashes, and a Health Ministry graphic circulating on Facebook over the weekend warned of the most common symptoms of scorpion stings: severe pain at the sting site, high fever, sweating, vomiting and diarrhea.

A deathstalker’s sting can kill a child. Adults may also sicken and die, depending on their health and weight, said Mohamed Abdel-Rahman, a molecular toxicology professor at Suez Canal University who studies scorpion venom.

News reports initially said three people had been fatally stung, but residents said the deceased were three soldiers at a police camp who had been electrocuted in the flooding from fallen wires.

Aswanis said that the rains had been the heaviest in seven years, but that flooding had rarely, if ever, touched residential areas before. The storm’s intensity led some Egyptian meteorologists and scientists to speculate publicly that it was connected to climate change, which has hurt Egypt’s olive and date harvests, turned vast swaths of farmland into desert and made the country’s already blazing summers even hotter.

Mourad Abazid, 56, a government employee from the low-lying village of Kobaniya, on the Nile’s west bank, said the floods had inundated his house, forcing him and his family to shelter at a mosque. He was now sleeping in the street beside the rubble of their home, while his wife and three children stayed with neighbors.

“Thank God, no one died; we rescued people, but our houses are gone,” he said. “We don’t know what we’re going to do now.”

Most houses in the village were at least partly damaged, he said, with some in danger of collapsing. There had been no electricity or water since Friday night.

“It was just an hour of rain, but it wrecked everything,” Mr. Mohamed said.

Aswan and the broader region of Upper Egypt have a long history of suffering official neglect. Amid widespread poverty, some Aswanis have turned to freelancing as scorpion hunters, a profitable if risky pursuit.

Scorpions can be milked for their venom, used for scientific research and some medical treatments. A single gram of scorpion venom, requiring the milking of as many as 3,000 scorpions, can be exported for $8,000, said Dr. Abdel-Rahman, who studies medical and scientific uses for the venom.

Toxins isolated from deathstalker venom are currently used in laboratory research and in cancer treatment, where they can be used to paint tumor cells in the brain during surgery, highlighting them for removal.

“I’m very, very sad when people kill scorpions,” Dr. Abdel-Rahman said, “because the venom of scorpions is very rich and useful.”

He and his research team regularly capture scorpions in the deserts around Aswan, Luxor, the Sinai Desert and Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, then stimulate the scorpions with an electrical current to extract the venom. Once milked, the scorpions are released.

In 20 years of scorpion research, he said he had never been stung, a record he credited partly to diligent use of forceps — never his hands — to pick them up by their tails.

“Professionals can catch the scorpions from the tail by hand,” he said. “But I don’t recommend doing that.”

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