We had been in Santa Rosa for barely 15 minutes, but Kate Jackson had already bagged her first specimen-an iguana that had ventured too far into the open.
She had chased it around the lightly wooded area surrounding the dorm rooms, and, just as the lizard had half-disappeared into its burrow, flung herself head-first after it, grabbing its hind legs. Jackson pulled the iguana out of its burrow, and, save for a few scratches on her right forehand, emerged triumphantly with her first catch.
This became a recurring pattern over the next week at Santa Rosa-a tropical research station in Costa Rica’s Area Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG). Snakes, especially, made Jackson jump. Sometimes she lunged at them with snake-handling tongs; other times with bare hands. Once, I even spent a tense few minutes with her as she flipped through field guides to Central American snakes, trying to identify a snake that had just bitten her hand.
“A few of us never outgrow the reptile and dinosaur phase,” she said. Such people become herpetologists-scientists who study amphibians and reptiles.
As a child, Jackson obsessively memorized the names and calls of Ontario frogs from field guides. In 1992, she spent the summer as the head curator at the Reptile Breeding Foundation, a now-defunct serpentarium in Picton, Ontario. “They had so little money that they couldn’t afford escape-proof lids,” she said. “Things were constantly escaping.” The summer after, she was a zoo keeper at the Toronto Zoo.
Her PhD thesis, at Harvard University, turned upside down the conventional wisdom on the evolution of venomousness in snakes.
Of the 3,000-odd snake species in the world, 2,400 are considered “advanced snakes,” and lumped together into the Colubroideae “super family” of species; 500 of these are considered venomous. By examining the shape and look of various snake fangs, Jackson determined that the ancestor common to all Colubroid species was venomous. So many of the 2,500-odd species of Colubroids currently deemed harmless may in fact harbour dangerous venoms, but lack properly-shaped fangs to deliver them. (Case in point: At the ACG, the bite of a “harmless colubrid” on Jackson’s upper arm developed into a largish purple and orange welt that persisted for several days.).
Jackson, 33, is a post-doctoral researcher in the department of zoology. She plans to write a field guide to the snakes of central Africa. “It’s becoming much less unusual for women to become herpetologists,” she said. “But venomous snakes and crocodiles are the last bastions of men.”
Perhaps. Two Costa Rican herpetologists, who went “snaking” with Jackson one night, later said they had felt uncomfortable with Jackson’s “cowboy” tactics-a bad word among herpetologists. Jackson, however, saw things differently.
“I thought that was essentially sexism,” she countered. “I’ve handled hundreds and thousands of venomous snakes and have never been bitten by anything I was trying not to be bitten by.”
She said their impressions had been coloured by snaking with Harry Greene-a world expert on venomous snakes. Zoology professor Dan Brooks, who goes to the ACG yearly to collect parasites, explained that Greene catches venomous snakes by herding them from a distance with a stick. This tires the snake out after a while, allowing Greene to gingerly stuff it into a sack. Jackson, however, would have none of the “c-word.”
“I think we all have a streak of cowboy in us-all venomous snake biologists [do],” she asserted. “However sensible and reasonable we are, there is a thrill to catching a venomous snake.”
The Varsity’s Science section is interested in profiling U of T’s most interesting young researchers on the make. Do you know science nerds who have good science stories to tell? We want to know about them. Email your suggestions to [email protected]
