The Snake Island || Knowledge With Raj ||

The Snake Island

About 25 miles off the coast of Brazil, there is an island where no local would ever dare tread. Legend has it that the last fisherman who digressed too close to its shores was obtained days later adrift in his own ship, lifeless in a puddle of blood.

Source: Google

The mysterious island is known as Ilha da Queimada Grande, and it is in fact so dangerous to set foot there that Brazil has stirred it illegal for anyone to see. The jeopardy on the island comes in the form of the golden lancehead snakes- a species of cavity viper and one of the most dangerous serpents in the world.

The lanceheads can thrive to be over a foot-and-a-half long and it's estimated that there are between 2,000 and 4,000 snakes on the island, which unsurprisingly is known as Snake Island. The lanceheads are so poisonous that a human bitten by one could be dead within an hour.

Snake Island is uninhabited now, but people used to live there for a short period up to until the late 1920 s when, according to legend, the local lighthouse custodian and his family were killed by vipers that moved in through the windows. Today, the navy periodically visits the lighthouse for upkeep and manufactures sure no adventurers are walking too close to the island.

Another local legend claims that the snakes were originally introduced by pirates seeking to protect buried treasure on the island.

In reality, the vipers' presence is the result of rising sea levels- a less provoking ancestry fib than psychotic pirates must be ensured, but still interesting. Snake Island used to be part of Brazil's mainland, but when sea levels rose over 10,000 years ago, it separated the landmass and turned it into an island.

Source: Google

The animals that wound up isolated on Queimada Grande evolved differently from those on the two sides of the strait over the course of millennia, the golden lanceheads including with regard to. Since the island vipers had no prey but birds, they evolved to have extra-potent venom so that they could almost immediately kill any chick. Neighborhood chicks are too savvy to be caught by the many predators that inhabit Ilha da Queimada Grande and the serpents instead are dependent upon fowls who visit the island to rest as food.

Lancehead snakes, which are the golden lanceheads' mainland cousins, are responsible for 90 percent of all snake pierces in Brazil. A burn from their golden relatives, whose venom is up to five times more potent, is less likely to actually happen due to their island isolation. However, such an encounter is far more likely to be lethal if it does happen.

There are no fatality statistics of the golden lanceheads( since the only area they inhabit is cut off from the public ), however, someone bitten by a regular lancehead faces a seven percent hazard of death if untreated. Treatment does not even guarantee a lancehead burn prey will be saved: there is still a three percent mortality rate.

Source: Google

It's hard to imagine why anyone would want to visit a place where a painful extinction lurks every few feet.

However, the vipers' deadly toxin has shown potential in helping to combat heart questions, leading to something of black market demand for the toxin. For some lawbreakers, the tempt of the money is incentive enough to risk almost certain death on Ilha da Queimada Grande.

Information Source: Internet

Image Source: Google

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