Coyote Peterson is in Deland, FL, Reptile Discovery Center. He is going to see a King Cobra and a Gaboon Viper snake. He is meeting up with Mara and Carl. They are going to be milking those two snakes (for their venom).
They are first going to be milking the King Cobra snake. Coyote Peterson is really excited!
Carl said "The King Cobra snake is a young female. She is about four and a half years old. She is only about ten and a half feet long."
Then Coyote Peterson said, "wait, did you say only about ten feet long!!??"
Then Carl said "well yeah for a King Cobra that's not that long. In fact, King Cobra's are dimorphic by size. So males get much larger than females. A male King Cobra is sixteen feet long, but a female King Cobra only gets to about 11 feet."
King Cobras are ophiophags. They are snake eaters, almost exclusively. But in the Reptile Discovery Center, they give them rats to eat instead of snakes.
They milked the King Cobra. The King Cobra's venom was a beautiful deep yellow. There were four hundred milligrams of venom. Four hundred milligrams of weight is less than 1/8 of a tsp in size. That can kill a lot of people if that snake bit someone!
Next, they are going to be milking the Gaboon Viper! A Gaboon Viper is a really fast snake. If you're just walking in the woods and if you are really close to a Gaboon Viper but you don't even know it's there, the snake will just remain motionless and try to blend in but if you get a little too close then well you are in deep trouble. It only takes a hundred milligrams to kill a person. And it gives out five hundred milligrams of venom!! So that can kill five people!!
They milked the Gaboon Viper!
Now they are going to see what happens with the snake's venom and with human blood mixed in. And that's going to be Coyote Peterson's blood. They are going to be seeing stuff under the microscope. When they put the Cobra venom and Coyote Peterson's blood together, the blood cells explode apart immediately! The venom keeps drawing toward itself all the good blood cells until they are destroyed. It looks like the red blood cells are getting magnetized in toward the venom.
Watch the video to see what they see under the microscope.