Snake Island is not an imaginary location from nightmares or horrors, but a real place that people call it, although locally it is also known as Ilha de Queimada Grande.
It is about 30 kilometers off the coast of Brazilian São Paulo, and from the air, it looks stunningly beautiful - with an abundance of green vegetation, a beautiful rocky coast, bathed in the sun and surrounded by crystal clear sea.
One to every meter of land
However, the idea of a surfer's paradise and an exotic vacation location quickly falls into the water - because the snake island was not named because of its shape, but because it is home to the deadliest snakes in the world, literally thousands of there. There is no place on Earth where the concentration of poisonous snakes is higher, scientists say.
Since it's the surface area is only 0.45 square kilometers - the calculation is clear, there you will not only see the snake for sure, but you will see hundreds of them or one snake per meter of land.
No wonder people don't live on that island, and the only proof of human existence is a lighthouse built to avoid shipwrecks. Someone had to build a lighthouse and operate it, and according to the Smithsonian, in the early 1900s, the man in charge of it lived on the island. According to legend, the last beacon and his family did not survive, as the snakes allegedly entered their home through open windows.
Another scary story is about a fisherman whose boat was stranded on the shores of the island, so he had to disembark. As he tried to harvest the bananas, snakes caught him from the tree. In an attempt to escape to the coast, he was reportedly bitten more than a dozen times.
A snake whose venom dissolves flesh
A species of wormwood from the anger family remained captive on the island as ocean levels rose and separated the island from the mainland. Natural selection in the context of evolution has allowed snakes to adapt to their new environment, there has been an increase in population as they have no natural enemies, and on the other hand, a handful of food.
Snakes feed mainly on birds, but if it bites humans it is important to know that the venom of the golden snake dissolves human flesh at the site of the bite and is even five times stronger than the poison of the snake relative from the mainland.
The deadly species locally called Ilha de Queimada Grande is quite unknown, and the reason is that this island is her only home. It has a beautiful golden color and its head is spear-shaped. That snake family is responsible for about 90 of all bite deaths in Brazil. For example, if you are bitten in the mainland of Brazil and do not receive the drug, the mortality rate is around 10 percent.
Even with the antidote, the chances of death are about 3 percent, and symptoms include kidney failure, bleeding in the brain, bleeding in the gut, and necrosis of muscle tissue. But these are still golden land snakes - now imagine what she does five times more potent from the island.
Worse than the worst
Imagine the worst-case scenario of a snake bite. Well, worse, experts say. For example, a black mamba bite "shut down" the nervous system, paralyzing the victim and causing death in 100 percent of cases (unless the victim is one meter away from the antidote).
It doesn't seem like it could be worse than that, except for the fact that black mamba poison does not turn your internal organs into porridge and liquid. There is no case where one survived long enough to reach the hospital.
"These snakes are a particularly painful death," explains biologist Bryan Fry, one of a handful of crazy researchers who dared to visit the island.
"You will die screaming anyway," Fry adds.
