Human Blood vs. Snake Venom!

- Today I am going to take eight vials of my own

blood

and add to that

blood

the

venom

of three of the most potent vipers here in the United States. We have a doctor who will prick me with a needle and draw these eight vials of blood. And right now I'm feeling very nervous and a little apprehensive and might faint during this process. Well, here we go. Donate my blood for science. (screams) (energetic music) Today we are at the Reptile Discovery Center located in Deland, Florida. This serpentarium is home to several of the most dangerous

snake

s in the world.

And today, I helped milk the

venom

from three vipers commonly found in the eastern United States. The copper head. Wow, that was fantastic. The water moccasin. I'm going to be speechless, okay? And the Eastern Diamondback Rattle

snake

. Oh! That was a lot of poison right there. Typically, this poison is sent to their medicinal toxin poison lab, where it is turned into a life-saving antidote. But today we are going to perform an experiment unlike anything you have ever seen. Okay, the crew is ready. (sighs) Alright guys, today's experiment will show us what happens when snake venom is mixed with

human

blood.

I've always been curious to know what happens when a snake bites you and that venom enters your bloodstream. So today, what we're going to do is take eight vials of my blood, create a control, and then mix poison into three different vials and show you exactly what happens. I know, it looks like Coyote, let's get to the point now. I'm just going to drag this out because I'm very squeamish about needles. You guys have no idea how nervous I am right now. I could get bitten by bullet ants, I could get bitten by giant desert centipedes, when it comes to sticking a needle in my arm, nothing gives me goosebumps more than that.

We have a doctor on set with us and she will safely draw my blood. - I need you to keep your arm very still. - Very still. - Don't push it back. And if you feel like you're going to faint, tell me. - Well. - If you get dizzy or start to feel very hot. - Well. I'm already hot, I'm sweating buckets right now. More nervous than I am about the ants, the centipedes, like (grunts) the worst day of my life. - Well, even hotter than you now. - Okay, yeah. - Okay, are you ready? - Yes, I can be ready. - 1, 2, 3. (screaming) - Find a happy place, find a happy place.

Is this considered a lot of blood at once? - This is a good amount. It certainly won't hurt you. - Well. I'm going to leave the GoPro on what this is to see what's going on. I can't look with my own eyes, I can't stand it. I can't feel my arm. Should I do something with my arm? - No. (breathing) Okay, are you ready? - So that? - I'm going to take out the needle. (screaming) Are you ready? - Is he out? - No. - Yes, I'm ready. (screaming) Oh my God, you're going to like a splash of blood if, oh my God, you look at all those tubes of blood.

Holy Mackerel. But what we're going to do now is walk down the hallway, meet Carl, and move on to step two of this experiment. Holy shit, look at all these vials of blood. That's a lot of Coyote spilling out in the name of science. Well Carl, I'm back with eight vials of my blood. Now we're only going to need four for this experiment, so I'll put these other four here as a backup. And we have the whole experiment set up. We have three vials containing Copperhead poison, Water Moccasin, and Eastern Diamondback. Over time, that blood will flow through this board we've created.

But before we get there, let's talk about these poisons and why they are potentially dangerous. - Okay, so Coyote, these three snakes make you bleed, they cause hemorrhage, and hemorrhage is dangerous for a number of reasons. Your blood is not clotting, you are losing blood from your blood vessels, your blood cells are breaking down, your red blood cells are disintegrating, they are not carrying oxygen to your tissues. They all cause you to bleed. They do it a little different. The mechanisms that work do it a little differently, but they all cause that important problem of hemorrhagic coagulopathy. - Okay, man, that's complex, but it sounds very painful at the same time.

Obviously a lot of pain is experienced with the bite of any of these species of snakes. Okay, I'm definitely putting on my safety glasses for this part. I'm going to open this vial and expose the poison. Now, I have this one labeled Copperhead, and you see, I also have a blunt tipped needle. The reason for this is that if this were sharp and accidentally pricked me, it would be like a snake's fang. What you don't want to do is poison yourself while working with poison. So, oh man, I'm going to make your hand nervous just by picking up and holding what's there.

That is a very powerful poison. Now, Carl, I'm going to need your help. If you could tilt it a little bit until I can get some poison. I think thats enough. - Yeah. - That's probably more than a snake bite. - No doubt. - Well, there's our Copperhead poison. Woo, one less. Next up will be the Water Moccasin. Wow, look at that poison performance. - Gives you an idea of ​​how dangerous Cottonmouths can be and part of that equation again is performance. It's three snakes, of course, but still. Here we go. Oh, that's a toxic little mix.

Oh, a little trickle is coming. Well, I'll leave it there. And now we are going to mention the most powerful of all, the Eastern Diamondback. Woo, this is the biggest one here, okay. Here we go. And yes, there would be enough poison to kill you, right? - Probably. - Okay, so we have our three poison syringes lined up. Thanks, Carl. Woo, that is, keeping your hand studying is not an easy thing. Okay, so the first one, our green will be the Copperhead. Well. Here we go. Dangerous little tube right there. Okay, moving on to the yellow labeled water moccasin, be careful.

Water moccasins can be deadly. This is definitely not a snake you want to play with in the wild. Admire these guys from a very safe distance. Well, here we go. That's moccasin poison entering my blood. And last but not least will be the Eastern Rattlesnake. Okay, that's still a very, very dangerous syringe right there. There are still some poison residues. Well, here we go. That's Eastern Diamondback Venom getting into my blood. Okay, well, let's take 15 minutes. We'll come back and step three of this experiment will tell us exactly what happens from a visual perspective when snake venom is added to

human

blood.

But I know many of you have said before, Coyote, that you have been bitten and stung by many things, that you have been bitten by a poisonous snake. Now, Carl, I want to open up this conversation to tell everyone watching how crazy the idea of ​​being intentionally bitten by a venomous snake is. And just to be clear, guys, I'm never going to intentionally bite, like, something from a copperhead, water moccasin, or rattlesnake. And tell us why this is so harmful. - Because insect bites and snake bites are very different things. And so insect venom largely evolved to cause pain and basically what they're trying to do is get you away from maybe their nest or something like that.

Snake venom evolved to immobilize and kill the food they eat. And that's why snake venom is destructive on a lot of different levels. So, you have blood chemistry problems, neurological problems, cardiac problems, a depolarization of the muscle cells in your heart, maybe you have all of these things, nephrotoxicity, myotoxicity, cytotoxicity. , cardiotoxicity, neurotoxicity. A snake bite can be a very dangerous event. In fact, it can be a lethal event and at the cellular level it is catastrophic. It is nothing to be fooled or taken lightly. There is no doubt about that. - Okay, it's been about 15 minutes that the poison has been seeping into my blood.

And that was the big moment, so I'm curious, so I know you're all curious, what exactly happened to my blood with that poison in it. So the first thing we're going to do is put on my safety glasses. It is always important to wear safety glasses when conducting scientific experiments. Then we have another needle with a blunt tip, which is the control. That's the blood in here and when I pick it up and look at it, yeah, it still looks super runny. So what we're going to do is we're going to draw blood from each of these vials and I'm going to make a little stripe like this on the top of this plexiglass board, we'll see what happens.

Is depleted? Does it turn into jelly? We don't know, right? - It will be interesing. - I guess we'll see. And I'm going to try to make a nice little streak over here just like that. (screaming) What! That's some clotting, isn't it, Carl? - I can see that coagulation, yeah, that's cool. - Well, that sounds like a zombie movie. So Carl tells us what happened because there was no poison there and yet, you had these chunks of blood that looked like they were vomited onto this plexiglass plate. - When you expose blood to oxygen, it will begin to clot. - Good. - And that's what we're seeing there. - And then that is healthy blood. - Absolutely. - Healthy blood exposed to oxygen will clot.

Overall, I seem to be healthy. So now we move on to Copperhead. That's our green vial here. And I'm just going to tilt it left and right. Now, like you were saying, Carl, that anticoagulant makes this sound like a lot. It is very difficult to say if we will see anything with the naked eye, but I assure you what is happening in that tube right now, cellularly. , it is as we talked before, catastrophic. - Well. - So, let's see if we can see something with the naked eye. - Here we go, Copperhead blood is rising. Wow, look at all those bubbles.

I didn't really see that in the control. Well, here we go. Oh wow, look at that. It's just leaking. I'm not even applying pressure yet and look at that, it's just dripping out of the syringe. - Wow, look at that. - Wow, certainly to the naked eye it looks like there's less clotting there, right? I mean, with the naked eye, I mean I just ran up to where now, I saw a couple of little micro clots, maybe there, but with the naked eye, I don't know what you saw, but anyway, interesting. - That was blood flowing incredibly fast.

I mean just the rate at which he slid down and out of the plexiglass, you can see that a lot of the blood here still isn't coming out. This was, yes. See, you can almost see its more watery consistency. So the blood cells break down and cannot hold each other. Again, to the naked eye, this is what it would look like. - Again guys, we cannot emphasize enough how the internal aspects of what is happening at the micro level are happening, which if we had a super powerful microscope, we could see. I mean, this is just explosions of blood cells and everything falling apart inside. - All those little cell walls are being affected. - Okay, here we go.

Water Moccasin. You can see there. The blood definitely looks very thin too. Again, a whole cocktail of proteins and toxins that are turning this blood into who knows what. I get it, oh wow. So that's having trouble sucking blood in there. - See a little more coagulation in this sample. - There we go, okay. And my glasses fog up. I'll do my best to keep my hand steady, but even interacting with poison and blood definitely speeds up your heart rate, that's for sure. That's my blood mixed with water moccasin venom. And again, you can see that that blood just wants to come out of the tip of the needle without me applying pressure.

It's just leaking on its own. So I'm going to very slowly apply some pressure. There we go, wow, look at that. - Now there are certainly some clots visible in that sample. - Oh yeah. - More than Copperhead's poison. - Yes, that's true. Look at that, you can still see all of that. It looks like a worm crawling down the side of the plexiglass. -But certainly the Copperhead venom seemed thinner than the Cottonmouth venom relative to the control. It's hard to say, but maybe we're seeing some anticoagulant activity there, maybe. - Okay, here we go. I have the poison of the Eastern Diamondback in my blood.

The top falls again. Here we go. Syringe going in, again guys, flat tipped needles, even if I were to get stuck with a needle with poison in it, that's like suffering from poisoning. Oh yeah, look at that. Look how thin that blood is. That stops much easier than the Copperhead or Moccasin. Wow, look how watery that is, it's crazy. What does human blood look like once poisoned with the venom of the eastern rattlesnake? Here we go, one, two, three, oh, there's a little clotting there. Wow, look at that. - Some significant coagulation and remember this, Coyote, Eastern Diamondback venom, we believe there is both anticoagulant and procoagulant activity.

But that's interesting. - Well, well there we have it between the control, the Copperhead, the Moccasin and the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake, visually across the board, there seems to be quite a difference, right? Even with the control, I don't see any blood stains compared to these three. But from your expert perspective, Carl, what are we really seeing here? I mean, it looks like a horror movie, but it's hard to tell at a glance. -Yes. So Coyote, I think we should point out that this experiment is really crude. You know, what we're looking at, we're speculating a little bit and based a little bit on what we know about these certain snake venoms, but this really needs to be done under a microscope in a really controlled environment where we don't have this time difference and we're not sure.

Make sure the amount of poison used is exact to get a real idea of ​​this. But I think it's safe to say that what's happening here, whether we can see it with the naked eye or not, is serious and catastrophic damage at the cellular level. - And I think for everyone watching, not only did I hear you say we have to do this again, which means there will be a sequel to this video, but the big takeaway is that snakes in the United States have the potential to be very dangerous. This is not a species you would ever want to interact with in the wild.

And for all those asking, Coyote, will a poisonous snake bite you? The answer is no. You can see that this again is catastrophic. If you are bitten by one of these snakes, it is a medical emergency and with all of our content, we want to encourage viewers to admire these animals from a safe distance. Don't try to kill them. Don't try to catch them. Never experiment on yourself to see what would happen if you got tangled up with these things. - No doubt. I think it's an excellent synopsis. And hey man, are you going to clean this up? - I will, yes.

I'll clean up all the mess I've made here in the lab. But for all of you who are watching and wanted to see what would happen if Coyote Peterson was bitten by a venomous snake, there you have it guys, my blood tangled with venom. I'm Coyote Peterson. Be brave, stay wild. See you on the next adventure. Every year, around the world, people are bitten by venomous snakes. And it's probably accurate to say that each and every one of these stings occurs by accident. Some species like the Copperhead are likely to kill you, but a complete poisoning of an Eastern Diamondback will surely take your life without the administration of antivenom.

Carl and Mora perform thousands of milkings each year, risking their own lives in case you are unfortunately bitten by one of these slithering reptiles. However, that doesn't mean you should be afraid of snakes. Almost all bites occur as a result of humans attempting to move, harass, or kill one of these animals. The best course of action is to always respect snakes from a safe distance, ensuring you do not have a catastrophic interaction. If you want to learn more about snakes and the power of their venom, be sure to visit the Reptile Discovery Center website where you can schedule a snake milking demonstration.

Hello Coyote Pack, if you thought milking some of North America's deadliest snakes was intense, be sure to come back and watch the episode where we milked Australia's most toxic snakes. And don't forget, subscribe, click the notification bell and join the memberships so you can follow me and the team on our next wild adventure.