Snake Lab

With the weather continuing to be problematic, the daily routine here at the lab has been altered quite a bit and the recent highlight was yesterday's "snake hunt".  Bimini is home to the endangered endemic snake specie known as the Bimini Boa.  While at first glance this snake appears to have rather plain black and silver scales, upon further inspection these same scales radiate a rainbow spectrum when properly lighted by the sun.

For as long as the Sharklab has been operating, keeping tabs on the Bimini Boa population has been a side priority.  With winds strong enough to prevent our field teams from going out on the boats, we instead went searching the woods of South Bimini for this elusive snake.  With three teams spread across the island, we were able to find three boas; two large females and one younger female.  My team, which searched the area around Bimini's "Fountain of Youth", consisted of Marc, Andrew, and me. After thouroughly searching the surrounding woods, we found a large female nestled inside a small stone wall.  After reaching my hand in and getting a hold of the snake's lower half, I pulled the snake out carefully as Andrew removed the necessary wall segments.  Needless to say, the snake wasn't exactly happy and found my hand a convenient place to shit and musk all over ("musking" is essentially the snake equivalent of being skunked; they shit out a liquid stench that  can best be described as rotten bodily mayonnaise.  

Back at the lab, each snake was carefully worked up, which consisted of two length measurements (head to cloaca, and cloaca to the end of the tail) and PIT tagging.  As with lemon sharks, the Bimini Boa's that we catch are given PIT tags so they can identified and analyzed to determine their growth and range.  During the work ups, I was assigned the glamorous "shit duty", and was responsible for controlling the final third of the snake while catching the glorious shit and musk they all-too-gladly spewed when scared.

Continuing on the topic of cleaning shit, the infamous "Shit Pit" has been confirmed for tomorrow...this should be interesting.