Ever since the wily serpent urged Eve to take that fateful bite out of the apple, snakes have been on just about everybody's enemies list. In the Old West, calling someone a "rattlesnake" or "snake in the grass" could get you shot. Even newborn monkeys recoil instantly when shown the image of a snake. Is there anyone who has something good to say about the creatures?
As it happens, there is. Harry Greene, 52, a soft-spoken, Southern-accented biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, not only believes snakes have been badly maligned but has also made it his life's work to wage war on ophidiophobia (fear of snakes). It hasn't been easy, he admits. Even the saintly Albert Schweitzer, who went out of his way to avoid stepping on bugs, didn't hesitate to shoot the beings whose distinguishing characteristics are a slithering gait, a forked tongue and hypodermic-needle fangs that can (if they belong to Australia's cobra-like inland taipan) deliver enough venom in a single bite to kill 200,000 mice.
Greene, who describes himself as "stuck on snakes," believes they deserve a better rep. A collector since he was a seven-year-old in rural Texas, he sees them as far more interesting biologically and aesthetically than even fellow scientists once thought, and his research on snake behavior has helped show why. "Snakes are natural puzzles, suggestive of things that haunt and inspire us," he writes in his new book, Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature (University of California; $45). At once a paean to serpents and an encyclopedic review of what's known and not known about them, the book argues that instead of hunting snakes down to near extinction, as we've done with the timber rattler--once glorified on the American Revolution's "Don't Tread on Me" flag--we ought to consider them "worthy of respect" and deserving of "a place in nature."
But how? For one thing, Greene says, we should suspend our natural preference for animals with fur, feathers and facial expressions. Then, he says, we would be able to start appreciating snakes for their "special beauty and mystique"--and for such unique characteristics as their extraordinary sense of smell, their amazing versatility, their stunning coloration and a repertoire of deadly toxins that could serve as a model for future drugs.
Guiding a dubious visitor through the double-bolted doors of the venomous-snake room at Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, where he is curator of herpetology, Greene emphasizes his point by plucking a yard-long Western rattlesnake out of its cage. "Touch his skin or feel his rattle," he says. "They're really works of art."
To Greene, the greatest achievement of the snake is how well it has adapted to its varied environments. Like sharks, which have a similar image problem, snakes occupy almost every available ecological niche except the polar regions, from rain forests to deserts to the sea. Probably descended from nearly limbless lizards that lived during the age of dinosaurs 90 million years ago, snakes are divided into some 2,700 species, ranging in size from pencil-long African thread snakes to gigantic 20-ft. pythons and anacondas that are big enough to swallow a human. To fit into a cylindrical body, their viscera are ingeniously modified--with organs either shrunken or stacked on top of one another.