BIRMINGHAM NEWS (Alabama) 28 September 08 UAB team searches out water snakes to study their eyesight (Mike Bolton)
The dusk had turned to darkness and the moon had yet to rise. Mike Loop and Bob Baker looked at their watches and agreed it was prime snake time.
The two eased down the bank of Shades Creek just off of Montevallo Road and disappeared into the darkness of the ankle-deep creek. The gentle flow of the creek on this night and the shallow water should be perfect to locate and catch snakes, Baker said as he flipped on his flashlight.
Baker, a UAB veterinarian, and Loop, a UAB associate professor of vision science, waded into the darkness, swinging their flashlights left and right, hoping to catch glimpses of snakes they will use in their research project on how well snakes can see.
"There's one," Baker exclaimed after walking 200 yards down the creek. He plunged an arm into the water and withdrew it with banded water snake wrapped around it. The snake's mouth was open and its teeth imbedded securely in one of Baker's knuckles.
"It's a pretty good one," he said, pulling the snake's head away to show the bite mark on his finger. "They're not venomous. You get scratches worse than this picking blackberries."
In a trek that would be most people's worst nightmare, the two waded the creek for more than an hour, plucking snakes from the water and out of debris piles along the creek banks. They captured eight large snakes and another dozen smaller snakes were left free.
They placed the snakes into a pillow case to transport back to UAB where the two men have spent two years debunking the myth that snakes don't see very well.
Why? Just basic science and exploring nature, Loop says.
He was always intrigued by the notion that snakes don't see well. Movies such as "Snakes on a Plane" that show scenes from a snake's perspective make the public believe that snakes have blurry vision and see only vague objects and movement.
Loop wanted to know if that is accurate. He began to search for information on how well snakes can see and found that no research existed. "There wasn't a single publicized topic that I could find," he said.
Loop devised a plan to gauge snake eyesight. By shaving a scale from a snake's head and attaching an electrode to the skull, he could record an impulse when the snake saw an object.
It was just a matter of placing the snake in front of a monitor, showing it a series of vertical stripes and recording the impulse. The stripes ranged from almost non-existent in width to wide. It was a Mr. No Shoulders eye chart.
Loop says he was mildly surprised to find that snakes can see quite well.
"They have 20/120 vision which is about the same as a dog or cat," he said. "That's not bad for the size of eyes that they have."
The easiest part of the two-year project, surprisingly, has been finding the snakes, the pair says. There is no need to travel to locations far from UAB because most of the creeks in suburban backyards around Birmingham are teeming with snakes.
"Most people have no idea how easy it is to find snakes," Loop said. "They are quite abundant."
`No big deal':
The sight of the UAB team, which typically includes graduate students and other curious onlookers, wandering through a creek in the middle of the night with flashlights has startled numerous suburbanites.
"They want to know what we're doing, and we tell them we're catching snakes and they say `Y'all go have fun,'" Loop said.
Snakebites are common but most water snakes are non-venomous and leave only scratches and a little blood, Baker said.
"The snakes have spit that contains an anti-coagulant and only a little blood flows out," he said. "I've been bitten hundreds of times. It's no big deal."
The team does encounter water moccasins, and they are handled with a little more caution. They are caught with a long-handled set of tongs.
"Water snakes eat fish, and they don't have arms so they have teeth," Loop said. "They just don't have those two big ones up front."
The group will eventually expand the project to include pit vipers and their thermal eyesight. Baker says that right now the project hasn't produced any practical applications to humans but the next step could. He says basic science has led to many human breakthroughs in the past.
"There's stuff going on there in those tiny eyes that we don't really understand," Baker said. "How those tiny eyes decipher things might one day lead to a bomb being able to find its target better or to help a blind person navigate better. You never know.
"We'll publish what we find and maybe somebody will come along and improve on it."
E-mail: mbolton@bhamnews.com UAB veterinarian on his team's research project to gauge a snake's eyesight - if they see clearly or not
Team searches out water snakes to study their eyesight

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