The Baby Rattlesnake Superkiller Myth You Heard at Summer Camp Is Wrong: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Perhaps you’ve heard it at trailheads and around campfires: beware of baby rattlesnakes, because they can't control their venom and they'll pump you full of it.

It's vivid, it's scary, and it's been repeated by hikers and ER doctors alike for over half a century. It's also not true.

A study published recently in the journal Toxins traces how the notion that juvenile rattlesnakes are deadlier than adults spread from a stray 1960s news item into a continent-wide article of faith, and dismantles it with the actual biology.

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Adults carry and inject far more venom and cause far worse bites, the researchers found, while babies regulate their venom just fine.

"This is an easily defanged myth that has generated dread, panic, and real-life consequences," lead-author William Hayes, a biology professor at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, said in a university press release.

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It turns out that, as rattlesnakes grow, their venom glands expand in three dimensions, meaning the amount of venom a snake can carry rises exponentially with size, according to their findings. A grown snake simply has far more to inject. And babies aren't the trigger-happy loose cannons of legend.

"Ample evidence demonstrates that baby rattlers, like adults, can control their venom expulsion, the adults possess and deliver far more venom when biting, and the adults cause substantially more severe symptoms in snakebite victims," Hayes said.

So where did the panic come from? The researchers point the finger squarely at the press.

The myth surfaced in news media by 1967, got amplified by California outlets through the 1970s, '80s and '90s, and metastasized across North American media between 2000 and 2014, per the university's summary of the study. The "venom-dump hypothesis," as the authors describe it in the paper, spread faster than any snake.

The most alarming part is not just that the public bought it, but who else did too. Surveys cited in the Loma Linda release found that 53 percent of Southern California students believed the myth, and a staggering 73 percent of emergency responders and healthcare professionals did as well. That last figure matters, because the study warns the misinformation can lead to "inappropriate care delivered by misinformed or patient/family-pressured medical professionals," as quoted in the university's news release.

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There is some good news buried in the venom. Media coverage has grown noticeably more accurate since 2015, the study found, as journalists began citing actual herpetologists instead of campfire lore.

Hayes wants that trend to continue.

"We're hoping to get the word out so that we can get this myth corrected," he said.

Probably the best takeaway for anyone spooked on a desert trail is to take a rattlesnake of any size as a creature that deserves respect and space, and any campfire myth with a grain of salt.

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