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Team Snake Meets Equipe Serpent

When I was a doctoral student, I started doing herpetological fieldwork in the Republic of Congo. When I was a postdoc, I started taking Congolese undergraduate students with me in the field because, like biology students everywhere, they need research experience and that was something I could provide. Some of the same students continued to work with me over many years, and we have grown up together as scientists. Ange Zassi-Boulou completed his doctorate a couple of years ago, and Lise Mavoungou is close to finishing hers, with me as cosupervisor. We are now colleagues and collaborators and call our Congo research group Equipe Serpent. I have been a professor at Whitman College, a small liberal arts college in Washington State, for the past 14 years, and I and my research students there call ourselves Team Snake.

Here I am writing about an expedition to Guinea in July 2021. This expedition was particularly important for me because it was the first time that Equipe Serpent and Team Snake were together in the field. The reason was that Jordan Benjamin, one of my former Whitman College students, had founded the nonprofit Asclepius Snakebite Foundation to tackle the problem of snakebite in sub-Saharan Africa. He runs it with his friend Nick Brandehoff, an American physician. In Guinea, a clinic run by herpetologist Cellou Baldé has been doing a pretty effective job of treating snakebites under very austere conditions. With more resources and training, the clinic could be even more effective, and this is what Asclepius aims to provide. Meanwhile, in Congo, there is no effective snakebite treatment available. Jordan, Nick, and I went to Guinea, and Lise and Ange joined us there, to get a sense of what effective snakebite treatment looks like in a country not very different from their own, so that we could work toward making snakebite treatment available in Congo. We were hoping that Congo could learn from Guinea and that maybe there would be things Guinea could learn from Congo. We also did lots of herping, alongside Guinean graduate student herpetologists Alpha Baldé and Martin Millimouno.

July of 2021 was a welcome moment of calm in the COVID-19 pandemic that had upended life in the United States for the past year. Vaccinations were available, COVID rates were down, and travel was once again possible. There we were, against all odds, in Guinea. The research institute in Kindia is a large complex of colonial-era buildings, including one for venimologie, housing the herpetology collection (fluid preserved), the live snake collection, and lab space, and one small building serving as a snakebite clinic. There’s also a guest house where we stayed, right on site. The campus is surrounded by wonderful herp habitat—rocky open areas with flowing water, cliffs and outcrops, tropical forest, villages, and small-scale crops.

Something I had not foreseen was how tiring it could be to be called on without warning to translate. I am Canadian and can function effectively in either French or English. But I must normally spend a lot of time lost in my own thoughts and not paying much attention to the conversations going on around me, so when someone suddenly said, Hey Kate can you ask Alpha if … or Kate, s’il te plait, explique à Jordan que …, again and again I had to explain, Sorry, my head is full of snakes, J’ai la tête pleine de serpents.

We found our way together as a group gradually. Jordan is a wilderness medic as well as a herpetologist. Like me, he can immerse himself completely—lose all sense of time and place—when focused on something exciting involving venomous snakes. Unlike me, he seems to experience the same sort of thrill helping people in medical emergencies, and he’s very good at it. On the first day, while Alpha and Martin and I went out looking for snakes, Jordan worked in the snakebite clinic with Nick. Don’t forget to take water with you and to drink it, he reminded me, otherwise you’re going to get an IV. We found no snakes on that first day, and Alpha, as the local expert, must have been feeling stressed about that. But I’ve been a herpetologist long enough to know that hours and days of beating the bushes and finding nothing is more the rule than the exception, even if the highlights we remember and the stories we tell are mostly about those exceptions. You have to just enjoy a beautiful day in the field in an amazing new place. I tried to reassure Alpha as we headed back to the serpentarium at the end of the day. The snakes can’t hide from us for three weeks, I told him, with only slightly more confidence than I felt.

The next day, we were joined by an older man, Naby Keita. Long ago he was bitten by a mamba and brought to Kindia for treatment. Cellou saved his life. When he recovered, he told Cellou he would never leave him. He now works as Cellou’s snake catcher and has named one of his children Cellou. Together we tried a different place, once again just a short walk from behind the serpentarium, working our way upward over a rocky slope with water trickling down it in places. Soon we were in dense forest habitat, pushing our way through tangled branches and lianas, pausing to catch our breath and sift through leaf litter with our snake hooks. Within the first 30 minutes sweat had completely soaked my clothes and trickled into my eyes. We saw a few small skinks, but no snakes, and little chance of catching anything we saw because of the difficult terrain.

Jungle habitat, said Alpha gloomily.

Just about all our fieldwork in Congo is like this, I told him. We do a lot with pitfall traps.

Alpha looked up and locked eyes with me. What are pitfall traps? I suddenly knew what the Congo herp team could contribute.

Ange and Lise arrived a few days later from Congo. On their first morning in Kindia, Lise decided to get started right away on the epidemiology work that she needed for her dissertation and headed to the snakebite clinic for the day, with Jordan and Nick. Ange opted to join Alpha, Martin, Naby, and me in the field, continuing our search for snakes. Again we spread ourselves out to cover the terrain. For the next several hours we searched trees, bushes, and other refugia for snakes, staying within a few yards or at least within sight of one another, mostly in silence and with all of us in private bubbles of focus on our own snake hooks and the rocks and trees and bushes nearby. The first time the bubbles burst was a false alarm. Martin pointed: I thought it was a snake, but now that I keep looking, and it isn’t moving, I’m thinking it’s just a dead twig. If you look where those two big branches split and then out along the smaller branch …

Oh yes, I see it. Thelotornis, right?

Yes, exactly! We laughed. It felt both validating and faintly ridiculous that the dead twig looked to both of us like the same snake, Thelotornis kirtlandii (Vine Snake).

But the next shout from Martin was not a false alarm. It was a Green Mamba, and it had gone up a tree—a perfect tree from which a team of herpetologists could catch a Mamba as long as we all got there quickly enough to surround it while Martin kept it in sight. Un serpent! Martin shouted with increasing urgency, un mamba! The tree was a short, stunted one growing out of the rocky ground, with another similar tree beside it but no other trees for some distance. Martin pointed where the snake had gone, and Alpha leapt up the tree after it, with Naby handing up the big tongs to him. The Mamba, a muscular streak of green and gold, glided up and out of reach along a branch and into the upper branches of the second tree, but Ange and I had both sides of that tree covered, keeping the snake from continuing down the trunk and onto the ground. Naby leapt up the trunk of the second tree and we passed the tongs up to him. Soon he had the snake caught midbody in the tongs and pulled out of the tree to an open rocky area where the rest of us could help maneuver it into a snake bag.

We all went out herping after dark when astonishing numbers of giant land snails and giant millipedes were out. It must be their mating season or something, said Jordan. We scanned the trees with headlamps and flashlights, hoping for snakes, but excited by the sleeping chameleons we found this way. We returned to the guest house, tired and dirty and content. Jordan and Nick decided to check on the patients in the clinic before turning in for the night, and Lise and Ange went along with them, so only I turned in. I was roused from my room a couple of hours later by excited shouts of the others calling for me. They thrust a plastic bucket toward me, all talking at once. The bucket had been standing just outside the front door of the clinic, and luckily none of the patients or staff had noticed that there was a snake in it. The snake was glossy and mostly black and small enough not to be able to get itself out of the bucket after falling into it. None of them was sure what kind of snake it was, but they were all experienced enough herpetologists to know of a few small, glossy-black, highly venomous possibilities that they weren’t certain it wasn’t. Hence the decision simply to bring the whole bucket to me. In the beam of someone’s headlamp, I looked at the little snake, glossy and black with a line of large bright-red spots down the middle of its back. It was a west African species that I had never seen before. But I’d seen plenty of central African ones in Congo and recognized the genus by the distinctive shape of its head as a (harmless) wolf snake (Lycophidion).

Over breakfast I noticed that Ange had his notebook open in front of him and was showing Alpha diagrams of pitfall trap arrays. I was so glad to see that he was explaining how to build a pitfall trap line so that the Guinean team would know how to do that, and I told him so.

Oh no, we’re planning to do much more than that, he replied.

Lise and Ange were planning to build a drift fence and pitfall trap array for and with the Guinean team and to monitor it with them for the first few days so that they really got the hang of it. And also funnel traps for catching snakes, Lise added. Ange went to the market with Alpha after breakfast, and they returned loaded with plastic sheeting, wire mesh, plastic buckets, zippers, scissors, several staple guns, and lots of staples. The herpetology team got to work. We unrolled the plastic sheeting and measured and cut long strips of it for the fence. We punched holes in the bottoms of the buckets to let water drain out. The most time-consuming activity was making the funnel traps. These are like lobster pots and built out of fine wire mesh, cylindrical in shape and with a funnel-shaped entrance at each end. Their cleverest feature is the use of a zipper along the length of the cylinder so you can remove a trapped snake and close it up again. The whole thing is held together with lots and lots of staples. By the end of the day we had a neat pile of all the materials needed for two pitfall trap arrays. The next morning, we set out into the forest to set up trap arrays in two locations suggested by Naby. Both arrays would have the same total length of drift fence and number of buckets, but one would be arranged in a single line parallel to a small stream at the base of an overhanging cliff, while the other would be three shorter fences radiating outward like spokes from the center, in a forest location without any streams or cliffs to work around. We spent most of the morning building the first one, and for most of that time we were on our hands and knees in the leaf litter, making sure that the bottom edge of the plastic sheeting was buried in dirt and camouflaged with leaves.

Over the next few days we caught small snakes, lizards, frogs, and even a small fish in the pitfall trap/funnel trap arrays. Several of these were species that the Guinean team had not seen before.

I see that this is a Psammophis [Sand Snake], but this is a species we have not seen before, said Alpha in tones of astonishment, seeing a field site whose herpetofauna he knows better than anyone through the new lens of the pitfall trap array.

Lise was unsurprised by his surprise, You may not always get more species using the pitfall traps than by active searching, she told him, but you’ll usually get different species.

As we made our way back at the end of the day, laden with specimen bags, we were spectacularly dirty—completely coated with a layer of forest-floor dust—from a day spent sweating in a wet tropical forest while crawling around and digging in the leaf litter.

How are you holding up, Martin? I asked, turning my attention to the youngest member of the team.

It’s been a good day, he twinkled, J’ai la tête pleine de serpents.