- Joined
- May 1, 2004
- Messages
- 2,290
Oh yes, they ARE! They are a rear-fanged snake and they do possess Duvernoy's glands, and no, I didn't get that information from Wikipedia, but from the "Venom Doc" himself, Dr. Bryan G. Frye, who has made a career of studying animal venoms and probably knows more about venoms and their components than anyone else. Garters most definitely do have a mild venom, just an inefficient means of getting it into you. Ditto for all Natricine snakes, actually. The venom contains an anticoagulant as well as neurotoxic components, which is why a bite from a Garter or Water Snake will bleed like crazy, way out of proportion to the physical injury itself. I've been bitten by Garters, and a Garter bite hurts and burns waaay worse than even a bite from a very large Rat Snake or comparable-sized Boid. The last time I got tagged good by a Garter felt similar to a bite I got once from a decent-sized Mangrove Snake(Boiga dendrophila), just without that pounding headache that Mangrove bites generally cause. I had tingling and numbness at the bite site for several hours, with burning and itching as it wore off, a lot like when you have had a shot of Novacaine and it's starting to wear off. If a Garter ever manages to get a good grip on you and chew, as opposed to that fast strike-and-release type of bite, you'll know it. Our North American Garters have a close relative in Asia, snakes in the genus Rhabdophis, which looks virtually identical to our Garters, but some of the snakes in that genus have caused human fatalities, and it was not due to allergic reactions, either. The store chain that eventually became Target used to sell small animals, including snakes, and they used to sell many, many Rhabdophis tigrinus as "Asian Garter Snakes". They looked just like a brightly-colored "Flame" Garter, and ate the same things. I had one of those for many years that I bought for $15.00, and free-handled it just like a Corn Snake, not knowing that it could have killed me! No one really realized that those little snakes were potentially lethal and they were imported by the thousands to be sold as cheap pets. When documented reports started coming out of Asia of fatalities caused by bites from that species, needless to say, they were no longer imported. Current studies suggest that these snakes, and possibly our Garters as well, acquire greater toxicity by storing toxins from frogs that they eat, much as Poison Dart Frogs acquire their toxins from eating insects that have in turn eaten highly poisonous leaves, so I have to wonder if captive-bred snakes that have never eaten a frog would have as strong a venom as wild-caught snakes, but the Garter than had bitten me was a long-term captive that was eating scented mice and fish, and I still had a very noticeable reaction that was quite different from a bite from most Colubrids.
pitbulllady
