Parasites, crickets, and rattlesnake poop

I discovered an interest in cold-blooded animals as a Boy Scout. My patrol leader, Adam Weitzel, had me over to spend the night at his house. On his desk glowed a glass terrarium with plants, a water bowl, and two Anole lizards from Florida. He was raising them for the reptile study merit badge.

He handed me a small plastic cage full of crickets and showed me how to reach in and grab a cricket to feed the lizards. I dropped mine and we crawled around chasing the escapee. We released him into the lizard cage where he was devoured in a matter of seconds. It was a blast to feed them and I was sad when they were too bloated to eat another insect.

My mom didn’t know what she was getting into when she took me to buy my first Anole lizard the next weekend. She learned to hate it when I came downstairs and told her I was out of crickets. One more errand to run. Thanks to my mom the lizards survived and I earned the reptile study merit badge in the months that followed.

My interest in reptiles continued into college. I started a gecko breeding colony that devoured a shipment of five hundred live crickets every two weeks. My wife learned to hate when I told her we were out of crickets. Buying five hundred at a time got to be a little expensive. Not to mention, our living room sounded like a tropical rain forest.

My senior project for my Animal Science degree was on parasites of reptiles. I met a Professor on the Internet who had access to an electron microscope. I sent preserved lizard mites to his lab in Hawaii. I collected the mites from the arm-pits of local lizards I caught in undeveloped dusty fields in Southern California. He sent me electron microscope images of the mites months later. The detail of the pictures was breathtaking. It was hard to believe something barely visible to the naked eye had large hairs on its body.











While waiting for my images to come back from Hawaii, I was taking an upper level Herpetology course that had a weekend field trip to the Mojave Desert. Twenty college students armed themselves with snake tongs and buckets. We were determined to catch as many reptiles as we could find in two days.

Sidewinders are the only snakes that leave “footprints”. We came across some sidewinder tracks in the sand and followed them to see where they went. At the end of one of his tracks was a perfectly formed sidewinder stool sample. It contained the undigested portion of his last meal. I jumped up and down in excitement as I pulled a sterile vial from my pack. A sidewinder poop was just what I needed for my parasite presentation. I zipped it in a protected pocket like a prized gemstone. You don’t get to bottle rattlesnake poop every day.

I jumped up and down again when I got to the lab. Under a camera microscope, I took images of a microscopic intestinal parasite, from the diluted stool of a sidewinder rattlesnake. That image was the trophy of my presentation.





I still enjoy watching reptiles and amphibians feed. Now I’m the merit badge counselor for the reptile study merit badge. I just realized I’m out of crickets.

S.E.M. image above taken by Dennis Kunkel. All other images by Blake C. Goddard