Perhaps you’ve heard of the movie “Snakes on a Plane.” How about snakes in a community college cafeteria?
That was the scene last weekend at Southwest Mississippi Community College when a snake expert spoke at the Southwest Mississippi Forestry Association banquet in the Horace C. Holmes Student Union.
Terry Vandeventer, herpetology field associate for the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, not only discussed snakes, he held them up for the crowd to see — including some massive venomous varieties.
Vandeventer, 69, grew up in Illinois and after college took a job at the Jackson Zoo, married a Mississippi woman (Ginger) and went to work for the museum. He’s been traveling the state for the past 45 years extolling the virtues of Mr. No-Shoulders.
He’s also studied snakes from Canada to the Amazon.
“We love them but we hate them,” he said. “We’re afraid of them but we’re drawn to them.”
Mississippi has 56 species of serpent, six of which are venomous — copperhead, coral snake, cottonmouth and three species of rattlesnake: pygmy, Eastern diamondback and canebrake (timber).
“There’s no such thing as a bad snake,” Vandeventer said. “There are venomous snakes, but that’s for rats, that’s not for you.”
Vandeventer said no one has died of snakebite in Mississippi in the past 75 years. By far the most dangerous wild animal is the whitetail deer, which has a habit of colliding with vehicles.
Nearly half of all snakebites are alcohol-related, he said. The best defense against a snake is to take two steps backward.
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For his presentation, Vandeventer stood on a low stage in the cafeteria in front of a large blue box. Every so often he would rummage around inside it and pull out one of his slithery friends — starting with a nonvenomous corn snake.
Snakes have a sense of smell 500 times greater than that of bloodhounds, he said, adding that they can detect the trail of a mouse months old.
“They are elegant and graceful,” he said as the corn snake crawled around his arm. “Snakes are intrinsically a good thing. There’s no such thing as bad snakes,”
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Next came a humongous gray rat snake, also known as chicken snake.
“I’ve seen pictures of a hen sitting on a chicken snake,” Vandeventer said. “He crawled up under her and ate her eggs and took a nap.”
Chicken snakes are skillful climbers. One made its way up a brick wall beside the front door of a house, inadvertently ringing the doorbell several times before the resident figured out what was going on.
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Vandeventer brought out a king snake, which country people love because they kill other snakes. That includes venomous varieties, to which king snakes are immune.
King snakes wrap around their prey and strangle them before swallowing them. Sometimes they dispense with the strangling part — such as when a turtle is trying to lay eggs in a hole.
“I have seen a king snake sit right there as she laid eggs and gobble them up like gum drops,” Vandeventer said.
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Vandeventer produced a blue racer, found in the Mississippi Delta and close kin to the black runner, which is common in southwest Mississippi.
Vandeventer said stories about the snakes chasing people are misconceptions.
“A snake crawling in your direction does not constitute a chase,” he said.
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Next came a hognose snake, also known as spreading adder or puff adder.
They not only aren’t venomous, they don’t even bite people. At most they might bump you.
But they do put on an impressive performance, spreading their neck, huffing and puffing, and striking with their nose.
If all that fails, a hognose will roll over and appear to undergo death throes before playing dead.
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If Vandeventer didn’t have the audience’s attention by then, he got it when he brought out a monstrous copperhead that looked to be almost four feet long and as thick as a man’s arm — far bigger than most copperheads encountered in Mississippi woods.
Though they’re venomous, “we can’t find anybody who’s been killed by a copperhead snake,” Vandeventer said. “But he can ruin your day, and that can prove very expensive.”
Treatment might include antivenin, which is made from snake venom — as are countless other medicines. Currently copperhead venom is being studied to treat breast cancer.
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Vandeventer introduced “the most hated and feared snake in Mississippi” — a cottonmouth.
Cottonmouths are the No. 1 cause of snakebites in Mississippi, but that’s usually because someone messes with them.
“They do everything they can not to strike,” Vandeventer said.
When threatened, the cottonmouth opens its jaws to reveal a white interior — not as a form of aggression but to warn an intruder to stay back.
Usually, “they only strike after you whack them,” Vandeventer said.
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A timber rattlesnake was next, stretching over five feet long and calm as a pet cat.
Unprovoked rattlesnake bites are extremely rare, Vandeventer said. In the past 50 years there have been just three instances of a rattlesnake biting someone walking in the woods in daylight in Mississippi. Every other bite resulted from someone trying to kill the snake.
“They’re peaceful animals,” Vandeventer said.
They also rarely rattle unless threatened. Vandeventer said he has had 2,000 encounters with rattlesnakes in the wild, and only 18 rattled before he saw them.
Rattlesnakes can live to be 50 years old, and his specimen was 33, he said. Though he used a metal pole with a shepherd’s crook to guide its head and his hand to control the body, the snake never did rattle.
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The piece de resistance was an indigo snake, an endangered species which hasn’t been seen in the wild in Mississippi since 1939.
Vandeventer’s looked to be seven feet long, and was so docile he got two children to help him stretch it out — Anne Reagan, 11, and Riley Palmer, 4.
Nevertheless, it would raise the hair on your head if you ran across it in the wild — much less on a plane.
