How Snake Anti-Venom Works | Venom Diaries

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Since the development of the front antivenenom, there hasn't been a single humanity.

[00:00:03]>> They don't strike and try and bite until they literally think they can get that bite. There's up to 175,000 falas that we know of. Oh, nice bite.

[00:00:17]Good everyone. Welcome back to Venom Dies. Today uh is a fun one, exciting one. We're going to learn all about antivenenom and how it all started. So, I have talked about this a little bit before, but I get lots of questions about it, especially on Instagram and and YouTube for people that are new to the channel and pages and so on. So, I thought we'd dive deep into it. Like, for me, being a snake handler, things are very safe these days. I've got access to great first aid, antivenenom, and so on. You got to imagine when they started this program all the way back in the 1940s, there was no antivenenom.

[00:00:49]There was no first the first aid wasn't effective. These are just toric and cut bite sides and wild and even traveling to areas to collect snakes was really really challenging and obviously dangerous. I think about this a lot.

[00:01:04]We're we're going to start with tiger snakes today because tiger snake was the first antivenenom produced in Australia for the first successful antivenenom I should say. Lots of people had trial and error with all sorts of wild mixes and so on.

[00:01:18]In regards to an antivenenom that works that you still see now, the first one was tiger snake. Eric Warl who founded the reptile park. Before he had the reptile park, he had Ocean Beach Aquarium. This tiny little literally like a fish shop at Ocean Beach here on the central coast cuz he's very passionate about his oceans. Um he started keeping other critters. Even had fairy penguins there. And um then he started with the snakes and he realized there was a really big problem with snake bite in Australia. And back then the biggest killer was the tiger snake.

[00:01:46]So he would go out and literally collect him and his keeper they go out and collect hundreds of tiger sacks at a time and they'd bring them back and they had this huge big pit out front of the Ocean Beach Aquarium back then. And then he realized very quickly he needed a bigger area. So he shut up shop there, moved to Wyoming and started the Australian Reptile Park and he started milking and process. You could imagine then like they'd milk the snakes and then they had to work out how to process the venom like freeze-dried. So he literally made his first freeze dryer.

[00:02:17]Very creative fell and you know a vacuum pump on it. Yeah. He worked out how to powderize the venom. He worked with CSL.

[00:02:24]They get it down there and they started the antivenenom process in 1948. They had the first available antivenenom on the shelf which is really exciting. But yeah, as a snake handler myself, I think back to those days a lot. I've been to the areas that Eric traveled to whether it's um actually where I was on the weekend out out over past the blue mountains up to cans around the cane fields and you know some people survived tiger tank fights right back in the day taipans when they first started going to cans and catching tipans if you got bitten by a taan you die that was it so there was one recorded there wasn't even a proper bite with an indigenous fellow north of Cooktown he got scratched on the back of his calf with a coastal taan and sort of skimmed past him and just caught a thing and scratched him. Not even a bite. He had a cane knife in his hand and he literally went and he took the back of his calf off. He almost died. He almost bled out. He still got really really sick. That was from a scratch. He was the only person recorded surviving a invenimation from a coaster of Taipan. Everyone else they just it was literally a death sentence. And in fact, one of he wasn't a reptile park employee, but but a person that was also working with some snake catchers um a fellow name by the name of Kevin Button.

[00:03:30]He went out and caught one of the first taipans and he got into a bag. He hitched a ride back to another fell's house where they were transferring the snake to be sent down to Victoria to be milked. They were milking them at the park and they were milking him at a few other places back then. And when he was transferring the snake from the bag that he put it in when he caught it out in the the canefield to the transport bag to be sent to Victoria, he was bitten.

[00:03:56]He was 20 years old. He died the next day in hospital. He was found. Terrible.

[00:03:59]Terrible. like like he literally gave his life for you know one of the first guys of of typing hand. It was crazy stuff. And you know, like even just traveling to these areas back then like nowadays we got mobile phones, you know, we got, you know, you can put Starlink on your car and you got you got it like internet anywhere you go. We got great cars. Roads are much easier. Um, you know, I remember reading one of Eric's books um where he had a vial of antivenom on type antimum and he ran it up from Townsville to Cans. It took like a day. Driving from Townsville to Cans now is literally about a 3h hour and 45 minute drive on beautiful Bman road scenery like no other. Back then it could take 2 or 3 days in the dry season to get from Townsville to Cans, right?

[00:04:47]It's like 300 not even 300 km. Back then wet season it might take you weeks cuz you get stuck at the creek crossings and then rains again stuck again and rains again. You get out and stuck again and blah blah blah. It would have been a nightmare even just going out to where I go over the Blue Mountains catch tiger snake. Seriously hardcore tracks remote and these guys they went out they pioneered and they got the first snakes and and helped create the first antenom.

[00:05:10]So um it's something I think about a lot. Anyway, we're going to dive into it. So I'm going to kick things off with I'm going to milk eastern tiger snakes.

[00:05:17]One of the first ever species milked or sorry the first ever species milked for antivenenom um with a successful antenom. So let's go. Fly snakes actually had a bounty on their head in places like Tasmania back in the olden days and thankfully those days are long gone. This is a classic Asian tiger.

[00:05:36]heavily abandoned, very defensive, got a real flat neck. Can you imagine like those first snake handlers? Like I was lucky enough to be literally mentored by some of the best snake handlers in Australia like Tom Wiggle who's still a director here at the park for a very long time. Um, and even Craig Adams, who was the operations manager when I started here back in 2006. Ooh, my bees came. So a lot of the early settlers Oh, nice bite. Nice yield. Look at that.

[00:06:10]Is squirted on the glass area. Come out so hard. So a lot of those early settlers cuz tiger sank used to be really common along the east coast.

[00:06:19]They're not they're not they're common in certain areas but not like they were cuz a lot of their habitat look at that.

[00:06:26]A lot of their habitat was destroyed.

[00:06:28]They like wetlands and creeks and rivers and so on. Um, and a lot of them would fear the development. But yeah, a lot of the time when when the early settlers in Australia, they come across snakes like this and um, you know, bite from this thing left untreated, really really high chance of death. Um, and you know what's going to happen when the venom eventually hits your blood system, your blood is literally going to turn into jelly. So you end up with these like blockages in your major blood vessels and you know huge big clots in your heart and your brain and then your heart and lungs literally just paralyzed from that neurotoxin and you can't breathe.

[00:07:07]So it's a real combined cocktail there.

[00:07:11]Very very nasty. But thankfully now with antivenenom first aid you can minimize that to almost nothing.

[00:07:20]raw venom, antivenenom. All right. So from here we combine them into bottles and we put them in that freeze drying unit just there for 2 days and it sits between - 56 and - 58°.

[00:07:38]Now also has a vacuum on it. All right.

[00:07:41]So the bottles are sitting up in here.

[00:07:43]It's in there for 2 days. Comes out looking like this. So this is king brown, not tiger. So the different species are different color venoms and that just comes with different proteins um in in those venoms. So from here, this is where it gets interesting. We send that to CSL securus. They take tiny little amounts of that and inject it into horses. So they got hundreds of horses down there. So they'll have a paddic of tiger snake horses and then they got taan horses and death horses and brown snake horses and so on. So the horse will get tiny little injection straight up. They'll bring the horse into a lab and they'll look at his bloods and they'll see the sort of immune response that horse through to that tiny little bit of venom. He starts to produce venom resistant plasma. They take a liter of blood at a time and they spin it and they spit the sorry split not spit split the plasma. Right? So you got red and your white. They then take the white and they put it through a plasma cleaning machine. Then they spin it and abstract the different plasmas cuz the whites made up and lots of different plasmas, right? They keep venom resistant plasma. Everything else, including the red plasma, goes back to the horse. Horses back out the pic that afternoon. That venom resistant plasma is antivenenom. Isn't that wild? They add some proteins to it so the human body's more likely to accept it. You can get bitten and c that or more. Get one vial of that and it can save your life.

[00:09:06]Okay, it's freezing cold today and the camera just fogged over like I think it was like 7° this morning. Anyway, we're definitely in winter. Um, so we had to put the camera away, warm it up, and we're back. We're talking about doing first aid cuz that's what you need to learn. So, before we get started, if you visit a park, you can get them online.

[00:09:22]We do our own snake by first aid kits.

[00:09:24]They're unreal and they could save your life. So, definitely get yourself one.

[00:09:28]Um, or you can just buy the bandages individually here as well. So first aid it's come a long way. All right. Like we talking about earlier back in the day they just cut bite sights try and flush blood out of there and venom and suck it and put a toric on and it was not successful. All right. But thankfully many years ago now they come up with pressure immobilization. These bandages are literally fantastic. You can use it for snake in front of a spider. So you got a pressure guide. The moment you got rectangles boom we got squares. Okay. So most people get bitten hands, forearms, and these feet. So have been bitten on the side of your wrist here. All right.

[00:10:08]So I'd remove any jewelry. Don't worry about washing the bite side. Like I said, don't try and suck an amount.

[00:10:12]Don't we on it. People still do that.

[00:10:14]It's yuck. And we're going to go three times over the bite side. So one, two, three. Half wrap. And then I am going to start making my way up here. If you miss a little gap like that, it's not the end of the world. Go straight up, go over your shirt, and then tuck it in, immobilize straight to hospital. If you don't have a bandage, what are you going to do? I think rip up your clothes. All right, you might end up naked, but it's not the end of the world. Get your clothes around limb tra. Now, one very commonly asked question is what happens if you bitten torso base trying to avoid that cuz you can't manage it. Um, but it is recommended you apply pressure. All right? So, rarely if you get bit on the face or the torso. I know one snake handler or ex snake handler I should say. Now, he had two bites, one in the armpit and one on the chest. All right?

[00:11:16]They're like the two worst bites I can think of and that is extremely uncommon.

[00:11:21]All right. So yeah, if you're being bitten by somewhere somewhere you can't pressure manage app pressure. I know amateur photographer that got bitten by a tiger snake on his stomach. He got too close. He was taking photos. Bit him there. He actually got his camera lens cover. Put it there and he strapped it on with his bandage and he got to hospital and he was okay. Just improvise if you need to um if you haven't got a bandage. And yeah, don't muck around.

[00:11:44]Don't worry about going home and telling mom or going to your mate's house or going to the pub or drinking anything.

[00:11:50]straight to hospital or call emergency services to come to you. Okay, that's first out of the way. Now, we're going to look at typing. Okay. All right. So, I'm getting the type out. This is the co top end. There's three species of top end. So, you got coastal inland or fishnake and then the western desert type. Even though the inland is more toxic than the coastal, it's like too toxic to use for the horses. It kills them. So, use the coastal and they can still make the anti venom for the inland. Wow. this fella.

[00:12:19]High caution. Lovely. Love that. I actually put one of these on my 2-year-old's car seat the other day.

[00:12:25]High caution. Little Winnie. She is a wild unit. So, this is only a sub. Um, so I don't milk this snake yet. He's a beautiful little snake, but they're just very nervous. All right. They're very, very nervous snakes. extremely defensive if they think something's going on. Um, and they're very, very long and slender. All right. So, you can see the snake is well over a meter now. Um, but very thin. Like, he's longer than that tiger snake I had out.

[00:13:00]That tiger snake was like three times as thick as this block. All right. Now, they've got generally a pale head and then that reddish to maroon type body and then a light underbelly with even the spots on that top third of the belly. Um, almost like a brown snake does. They're beautiful snakes, but mate, they are lightning fast. They're easily my hardest snake to handle. They're just so fast, so work alert. So the I would rate them as probably our smartest Australian species. Just so alert. They're so focused. They're so fixated and they don't carry on like you know like an eastern brown will strike repeatedly and sort of make itself look more dangerous than it is. These guys like he hasn't actually strike at me yet. Just move it.

[00:13:52]All right. They don't strike and try and bite until they literally think they can get that bite. All right, which you'd think that would make them easier to work with. It's not. All right, cuz when they go, they go 100% and they are fully committed on that strike, but generally you got to provoke them. And I am really agitate them um for them to do that.

[00:14:16]Okay, so like wild ta bands have definitely been some of the craziest snakes I've ever handled. Um, and they get big to 2 and 1/2 m sometimes, you know, records of almost 3 m from this species, like almost as big as king grounds. They just haven't got the bulk of a king brown. Um, much more lean and they've got the biggest set of fangs out of any of our Australian snakes.

[00:14:43]Okay. Really, really nice looking. Their head is like a coffin shape. That's scary.

[00:14:51]Look at his tongue going flat out there.

[00:14:54]Full noise. He's trying to work out what's going on. Now, when it comes to bites from this species, man, they are hardcore. All right? Like left untreated, within about 15 minutes, you can be vomiting, emptying your bow, and then you start to bleed out of your eyes, your gums, and every orifice. All right? So really confronting and that can be literally all of that can be happening within half an hour and then your heart and lungs are going to feel a lot of pressure to keep going and you would your body would slowly start to shut down. That's without antivenenom and like I said earlier any of the full invenimations of full invenimations that happened pre- antivenenom resulted in fatalities up in Fort Far Queensland where they're more commonly found around the sugarcane lots of rodents in there.

[00:15:43]They love to feed on small mammals. The real big ones will even eat bandicoots.

[00:15:46]They called them the killer of the cane field. What happened before like the old style of harvesting with sugar cane, what they would do is they would actually light the cane on fire and it would burn off all the leaf litter on it, all that foliage, and you'd be left with those sugary sticks, which was what they were harvesting. And the snakes would be in there and sometimes they'd survive. They'd get burnt. They'd be seriously agitated as you can imagine.

[00:16:14]Fair enough. And when people confronted them, tried to kill them, bitten or killed. And they're just known for absolutely exploding out of nowhere. All right. So, I still don't have any adults down here. I've only got these sub adults in the venom center. All my bigger taans are upstairs. Um, we were meant to go and collect last year. Um, but the collection fell through. So, going again uh this winter up to Farm of Queensland. All right. So, stay tuned for that one. I am very excited for it.

[00:16:46]So, going to get this fella away. I'm going to get a wilder type of ant.

[00:16:54]One of the wildest snake catches I've ever done. I was working up there and I was doing a bit of snake catching. And a lady that used to call me a fair bit, she uh had a lot of poultry on her property, had a big farm, a lot of poultry, a lot of chickens and geese and ducks and all sorts of stuff. And she always had pythons coming in there and eating the the chooks and that. I got a call from her saying she had a snake in the the yard and blah blah blah. And she said it was she thought it was a water python. Didn't have my snake catching kit with me. And I just said to said, "We'll just swing in and we'll catch this water python for DD and let it go."

[00:17:26]We get there and D's like, "Oh, it's in the shed over there." And it was in the ride on mower. And when her husband turned on the mower, it took off out of the the mower and went in behind these pots. And she's like, "It was really fast for a water python." And instantly, right then, I knew I just had this feeling I had a taan that I was going to pitch them with. So, I'm like moving the pots back. And there's a like 5ft taan like this. It's annoyed. The mar annoyed it. I reached down like this to grab it by the tail as it went to take off. And as I grabbed it, it shot straight out over me shoulder and then come back past me chest and it ended up on a shelf. I still had it by the tail. I was on a shelf in front of me and then it shot off the shelf back past me face and I was like and I said to Dee, I was like, "Hey, can you grab me like a stick or something to try and use this thing and a bag to put it in?" So, she gave me a piece of poly pipe was about this long, like thin poly pipe. And she got me an empty chook bag that was about that big. And I got him and I There's no way I was getting this thing in that chook feed bag. So, she ended up getting an empty like feed bin, this big feed bin. Got it in that, shot out, got him in, shot out, got him back in. It was wild. I have handled I can't tell you how many snakes. And I'm like not sounding cocky, but I'm very confident. And you put anything mistake in front of me, I'll I'll catch it. But that one definitely gave me a run for my money. And there's a photo. I don't know if I can if I can find or not, but I've got him by the tail and he's like comes over the top of me, crocs like literally like this far off my foot, mouth open, and this photo. And anyway, so we took it down the road and let it go. Siobhan was like, man, she was so off me. She was so annoyed. And when we let it go, I made her get a photo. Like I was like, I need a photo of a good photo of it. And so I got a stick and she was like, I'm not taking a photo. I was like, come on.

[00:19:25]And it's a really cool snake. And I finally convinced her to let me get a photo of it. And so I got this photo on the side of the road and a very agitated wife. All right. But fair enough. She's dealt with a lot um being married to Bilbo. Okay. So that was the two species the tigan that sort of started the antivenenom program in Australia. So now going to give you a bit of a look into I guess all the antivenenoms for our native snakes and just talk a little bit about snake bite in general. The antivenenom expires, right? So we keep a certain amount in stock. So I only got this recently and it expires in July 208.

[00:20:03]So generally it's got a 2year expiry date on it. Um we don't throw it out. A lot of these are empty boxes that go to like vets and so on and the vets can use it for for dogs and cats and even horses. I have to religiously check my antenn.

[00:20:20]And this is in worst case scenario. This is what we take to the hospital with us.

[00:20:25]We have our own antenom. Um the hospital only stocks a certain type of ant like a couple of antenoms. They don't hold type of antivenenom cuz there's no type ants actually found here on central coast. So I've got to have that. But like it's got black snake, tiger, and death generally um and and brown snake. All right. But you know, it might have been a really hot weekend. There might have been a couple of snake bites coming in and they might have gone through their antenom.

[00:20:47]And then I come in on Monday, get bitten by something, go down there, there's no antivenenom. That'll be a problem. Yeah.

[00:20:52]CSL gives us our own supply and our exotic antivenenom. So like we got king cobras, eyelash vipers, canths, rattlesnakes and so on. We import all our own exotic antivenenom. Okay. So we have to import that every couple of years and we're on like a with other zoos in Australia a list together and we all know who's got what um in case of a really bad bite. Now I also mentioned poly battle. So there's a mix of everything. Okay. So um not all horses are capable of doing the polyon. So for the horses, like let's say this 6 month period he does tiger snakes and then he has a bit of a break and the next 6 month period he does brown snakes and then the next 6 month period he does black snakes and then the next six month period he does death adders and then maybe they get into tens. Not all of them are capable of doing that. Some of the venoms when they're given it, they don't react that well to it or they don't throw a huge immune response. But the ones that do, they'll keep cycling through all the different species and then they're able to produce a polygra.

[00:21:52]Like I mentioned before, the brown snake's only a,000 units. All right. The tiger snake is 3,000. Death add is 6,000 units. Taipan's 12,000. Black snake's 18,000. Poly raven is 40,000 units. All right. So depending on what bit you, they might not give you all of that.

[00:22:12]They might only give you half or a quarter or a little bit or maybe they'll do the whole thing. But that is a lot of antib. All right? So they generally try and use species specific. Some hospitals only have polyalent, but this is just as effective as a species specific. And they'll also use this if they have no they just can't work out what are okay.

[00:22:31]They'll just go right on. Let's give them the polyent. And they can also use like poly they can use for a lot of species. Tiger snake is great. They can use it for sea snakes, copperheads, um, broadheaded snakes, even banded snakes, power headed snakes, rough scale snakes.

[00:22:46]There's so many snake species they can actually use this antivenenom for. So it's a really sought after one. They produce more of certain antivenenoms, I guess. And each year 600 vials of typan antivenenom also get sent over to PNG because there's typans over in PNG and they use all 600 vials every single year. Um they actually want more than that. There's still about up to 2,000 deaths a year in PNG. A lot of the time there's not they don't have access to first aid. You know it's a developing tropical country or they can't get to medical help. The snake bite epidemic in developing tropical countries is really bad. Um there's up to 175,000 fatalities that we know of in developing tropical countries every single year. There's like a world snake block community trying to work together to to bring that number down. But places like India, I may have said this before, they average a million bites a year with 55,000 fatalities. Isn't that insane? Where Australia, we see about 3,000 people present in hospitals a year. They're not all invenimations. They're not even all snake wires. Some are only scratches from sticks or whatever, but they think they've been invented by snake. Anywhere between 2 to 500 invenimations and maybe half that will be invenimations that require antivenenom. All right. So, and 25 milkings to make one v antivenenom.

[00:24:05]That's why we do so much. And then obviously it's got a really short expiry date on it of about 2 years. So, it's why it's just a constant cycle for us.

[00:24:13]Um, but we are extremely passionate about it. We love it. And I'll just show you quickly. It's the first time I've ever had it. I've also got now a V of funnel web squad antivenenom. All right.

[00:24:27]So, for those that don't know, we also milk the funnel webs here. So, we milk the male Sydney funnust.

[00:24:32]It's the most venomous of there's over 40 species of funn. It's the most venomous. Um, but it takes like anywhere between 150 to 200 milkings to make one wall of this. So, Emma, who runs our spider program, you guys have seen her on the channel before. She's an amazing at what she does. She's so good with the spiders and she's so good at milking spiders and breeding them. And now she's got like 6,000 funnel webs on site now.

[00:24:56]It's insane. It's the most funn.

[00:24:59]So, um she's absolutely pumping. We'll get her on the channel again very very soon. But yeah, that's a that's a vial of funnel web and that's only 125 units.

[00:25:06]That's not much, but very effective and we are extremely proud of this. Since the development of the final web antivenenom, there hasn't been a single human fatality. Isn't that cool? So it's been on the shelf since 1981. Yeah. So we started the fun web program as well.

[00:25:19]Robin Wagle, one of our directors, she started that in 1976. Like I said, had the first vial of antivenenom on the shelf by 1981. So and since then, not a single human fatality. Wild. They're a very like most danger spider. And in general, like it's hard to like the records weren't that good back in the day, but we know since the program's been going with snakes and spiders, we've helped save over 25,000 lives here in Australia. So, um yeah, that's really cool. And when we look back at all cuz, you know, a lot of the work we do here, it's dangerous and um but we're all extremely passionate about it and we love the fact that we get to help save people's lives. you know, it's really important and um it's a program that I think the park will continue to run literally forever. All righty, that's it for another episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If there's any questions you want answered, drop them in the comments below. Any ideas for future episodes, drop them in the comment below. All right, comment section, I should say. Um we've got lots of episodes planned coming up, but we're always after ideas.

[00:26:23]Um and we will definitely do very soon another Q&A question. They're lots of fun and I like love to answer the questions from you. Um anyway, thank you all for supporting the channel. Um you know the drill. Like, share, subscribe, and I'll see you all the next episode.