The Deadliest Snake in Qatar?
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| Copyright © Paula Hoeppner | In October 2007 a Natural History Group Trip was taking a rest during their tour of Qatar's Northern Forts. One family, with their eight-year-old son, sat down to have a picnic in the shade of a wall.
However, as they sat down, a snake was spotted, just inches from the boy, rearing its head into strike position.
The snake was the horned viper (cerastes cerastes gasperetti), also known as the sand viper.This is the most populous snake in the Middle East and North Africa, and its habitat stretches from includes Morocco, Western Iran, Iraq and Southern Sudan.
The horned viper may be the only truly poisonous snake in Qatar. However there is also a possibility that the far more dangerous - and aggressive - saw-scaled viper is present in Qatar. However, the last reported sighting was by nomadic bedouin 50 years ago, and even then they were not sure which side of the border it was.
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| Copyright © Drew Gardner | Horned Vipers are not naturally aggressive, but will attack when they feel threatened, as this one did. Fortunately, this time the boy in question managed to scramble away from the snake before it could strike.
Horned Vipers do not always carry their namesake horns above their eyes, and as you can see from the picture at the top of the article the young specimen that frightened this family did not have them.
To identify the snake, which can grow up to eighty centimetres long, look for a tanned skin with darker spots, and for a dark line extending from its eye to its temples as well as for its horns.
However, the chances are you will not see one – some members of the QNHG have lived in Qatar for 20 years without spotting one, and you are more likely to see the S shape the snake leaves in its wake. This shape is caused by side winding: a method of movement its body across loose desert ground - see Wikipedia's page on Side winding.
Perhaps it is spotted so rarely because of its penchant for hiding in the sand. It does this both to hide from the heat of the desert, and to prevent detection by lizards and rodents, which it will ambush when passing.
Although horned vipers will not go out of their way to bite people, and you would have to be extremely unlucky to get bitten by one, as a common species they have been responsible for their share of bites – including a series of 26 bites that took place in Saudi Arabia.
Horned Viper's bites are rarely fatal, with deaths seldom occurring in cases where the victim receives treatment within 6 - 10 hours of the bite. In fact, the story that Cleopatra used a horned viper to commit suicide is often discounted on the grounds that the horned viper’s venom was neither quick nor potent enough.
Moreover, the earliest known description of snake bites, written by ancient Physicians and stored in the Brooklyn papyrus, regarded the horned viper’s bite as non-fatal since victims could normally be saved.
Nevertheless, horned vipers can still be fatal, and in two cases documented in the Oxford Journal full grown men came very close to death after being bitten by specimens.
Related articles:
The Horned Viper: A Close Encounter A blog post on the incident by author Francis Gillespie
Desert Horned Viper: Description and General Information on whozoo.org
Side winding snake: A quick video of a side winding viper
An Introduction to Qatar's Natural History by Frances Gillespie
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