Recently Frank Jernejcic presented a paper on rattlesnakes to the WV Chapter of The Wildlife Society. Frank is the acknowledged expert on rattlesnakes in West Virginia, and he resides in the Cheat Lake area.
Franks discussed deaths from snake bites, and noted that from 1961 to 2023 there have been 14 deaths from snake bites in West Virginia. However, the snake bite situation is not as bad as that number appears to be. Thirteen of those deaths were caused by timber rattlesnakes and one by a cottonmouth. We don’t have cottonmouth snakes in the wild in West Virginia, but the one that caused this death was in a snake church where they handle snakes. I know that sounds a bit crazy, but in some very rural areas of the state there are, or have been, a few small churches where people handle snakes. Frank tells me that today there is probably just one such church in West Virginia.
Over the years there have been 11 of the 14 deaths occurred in snake churches. As mentioned, one was from a cottonmouth, the other 10 were timber rattlesnake bites.
Another captive rattlesnake caused another death and only two rattlesnake bites that caused death occurred in the wild.
As Frank noted in his talk, the fear of dying from a snake bite in the outdoors in West Virginia is way over blown because we’ve only had two such occurrences in the past 63 years.
Poaching Can Lead To Elephants With No Tusks. One of my readers sent me a copy of a report indicating that poaching elephants can lead to female elephants being born without tusks. He thought readers might be interested, so I dug into that topic and found some interesting information.
All male African elephants have tusks, but the percent of females that have tusks depends on their genetics. In Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique a 15-year civil war from 1977 to 1992 led to 90 percent of all elephants there being killed for their ivory. The ivory was then sold to finance weapon purchases for the war. Before the war over 80 percent of female elephants in the park area had tusks, but that dropped to 51 percent in 1992 when the war ended.
The thought is that so many elephants with tusks were killed during the war that those females without tusks survived at a much higher rate. The researchers postulated that this was genetically caused by selection.
Those tuskless females then gave birth to more tuskless females. The reason was that two genes that are active in tooth development in mammals had mutated in the tuskless females. (Note, the upper incisors are the tusks in elephants). When females with tusks were poached, the remaining females did not have tusks because of the mutated genes, so in essence the poaching selected for the mutated genes and that was why tuskless females became more common.
I might add that tuskless females have also increased in other areas of Africa where poaching is high. If poaching for tusks lowers elephant numbers then there is an obvious advantage for an elephant to be tuskless. However, elephants have tusks for a reason. They use them in defense, to dig, to lift objects from the ground and to strip bark from trees to eat. Tusks also protect the trunk, which is very important for drinking and breathing. Thus, going without tusks definitely has its disadvantages. Today there is no war in that park and poaching has stopped so the elephant population is recovering. The thought is that it could take many generations for the percent of tuskless females to decrease, but it should eventually occur.
DR. SAMUEL is a retired wildlife professor from West Virginia University. His outdoor columns have appeared, and continue to appear, in Bowhunter magazine and the Whitetail Journal. If you have questions or comments on wildlife and conservation issues, email him at drdave4@comcast.net
