Australia and the Pacific Islands 



INTRODUCTION 



Most of the islands of the Pucific Ocean have 

 no poisonons land snakes, althoujih those in equa- 

 torial waters are likely to have i)oisonous sea 

 snakes just offshore (See Chapter VIII). In 

 addition, some of the poisonous snakes that do 

 occur on islands are so small that they cannot be 

 considered a hazard to man. 



Australia and Xew Guinea liave larije numbers 

 of dangerou.sly i)oisonous .snakes lint of the is- 

 lands east of New Guinea only the Solomons 

 have poi.sonous snakes Mhich can even remotely 

 be considered dan<jerous. The Fiji Islands, for 

 e.\am])le, lime a poi.sonous snake {Ogmodon 

 i'if}(i)iiix) but it is so small (15 inches) that its 

 killinji powei- is limited to the small animals on 

 whicli it feeds. Fuitlier. it is so rare that most 

 island residents liave never seen it! 



Australia, on tlie otlier hand, is the only con- 

 tinent whicli has more kinds of ))oisonous than 

 non])oisonous snakes. More than (>() percent of 

 Australian .snakes are poi.sonous and some are 

 highly dangerous. Yet of the 00 species of 

 poisonous laiul snakes that inhabit Australia, 

 only about Kl are considered to i)e dangerous to 

 an adult man. Several of these have rather re- 

 stricted ranges and are not found in areas of liigli 

 human pojiulation. For a country with such a 

 higli numbei' of poisonons snakes, .Vusti'alia has 

 amazingly few deaths from snakebite — the annual 

 rate being estimated at 1 in 2,000,000. 



In New Guinea, just to the north, fewer than 

 25 percent of its snakes are poisonous. Of the 

 10 species of poisonous snakes, only (> are con- 

 sidered liighly tlangerous and -1 of these are re- 

 stricted to tlie southeastern coa.st adjacent to Aus- 

 tralia. Thus, only 2 species, the death adder and 

 the ikaheka snake, are of concern elsewhere on the 

 island. The remainder of the poisonous species 

 outside eastern New Guinea is made up of small 

 burrowing snakes or species resembling whiji 

 snakes wliose bites are of minor consequence. 



Aside from sea snakes which are found off'- 

 shore and in some of the rivers and lakes (see 

 Chapter VIII), the poisonous snake fauna of this 

 region is made up entirely of members of the 

 cobra family (Elapidae). Although they are 

 all elapids, none is a true cobra; none has a cobra- 

 type hood (though several flatten the neck — or 



even the whole body) and none stands up straight 

 in cobra fashion as a threat. Many of the 

 dangerous snakes of this region resemble North 

 American whip snakes and since they lack any 

 special physical characteristic (such as the rattle 

 of the rattlesnake or the facial pit of the pit 

 viper) or any unusual behavioral features, they 



1 r .- / ir Ocean 



^?^: ::. ~' 





Map 11. — Section 10. .Vustralia anil Tacific Islands. 

 (Include.s the Pafilic Ocean eastward to tlie coasts 

 of the Americas.) 



are particularly difficult to distinguish from non- 

 poisonous species. 



True, the dangerous deatli adder has the ap- 

 pearance of a viper (which it i.sn't), but other 

 dangerous species look like harmless racers, rat 

 .snakes, or king snakes. About the only way to 

 identify a poisonous snake from this region is to 

 kill it and look for fangs. (Chapter III, fig. 5). 

 Even this is not a foolproof method because some 



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