As Halloween approaches, Greg Pandelis, collections manager at UTA's Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center (ARDRC), sat down with Office Hours to explain what makes snakes seem so spooky—and to debunk some of the biggest myths surrounding them.
Question: What does Hollywood usually get wrong about how snakes behave?
Pandelis: There's a lot of emphasis when it comes to, you know, Hollywood or movie productions and things like that, that snakes are going to attack you, that they're some kind of, you know, dangerous animal, that if you get even remotely close, their first instinct is to attack you. That is the furthest thing from the truth.
Snakes are much more scared of you than you are of them. They're not looking to attack someone, and generally, stories that have to do with snake attacks, quote unquote, are not usually what is actually happening. It's people interpreting a situation in a way that is not actually consistent with what's going on.
Question: The ARDRC has over 200,000 specimens from around the world. Is there anything in the collection that looks straight out of a horror movie?
Pandelis: Well, some of our creepier things in the collection that we might have would include this timber rattlesnake right here.
This one right here always, always caught my attention. It has its mouth preserved open and you can see the fangs there, which I think are really, really cool, but I could see someone else walking by that and being pretty creeped out.
Question: When students first tour the ARDRC, does the experience help change how they view snakes?
Pandelis: We've had, we have a lot of students that are involved with the ARDRC. We do a research course where students can actually get involved and help with the curation of these specimens and assist with, you know, the database and things like that.
But there are always a couple students that are a little bit hesitant with, you know, especially with actually handling specimens.
You know, they might be a little grossed out at first. But in time, everyone that's ever worked at the ARDRC has totally come around and seen these creatures as being incredibly interesting.
Question: Are people naturally afraid of snakes, or is that fear something we learn?
Pandelis: There are a lot of other primates that have some innate fear of snakes. So it's not that crazy. But I would say from what we know, most of the fear of snakes that people experience is taught.
I think a good evidence of this is there are, I don't know if, if a structured study has ever been done on this, but there are tons of videos out there of little kids just like picking up snakes and, you know, showing no fear whatsoever.
And that's also why doing outreach with young children is one of the most fun and rewarding types of outreach for reptiles. Because you rarely get a negative reaction from a little kid, they're almost always excited and think it's cool.
Question: What do you wish people better understood about snakes?
Pandelis: I wish people understood that snakes are really, really cool animals and that there's so much that is left to learn about snakes, so many species left to discover, so many aspects of their natural history and their evolution and their ecology that's left to study.
And so they're actually a really, really cool system to study biologically.
And I also wish that people knew a little bit more about the snakes around us here in the DFW area.
If you're interested in getting a look at the ARDRC and all of the amazing specimens we have and interesting things, it's typically only open to researchers, but once a semester we do an open house where we invite all of the students and community members here in DFW to come and see what cool things we have going on at the ARDRC.
