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Joe Slowinski’s Love for Snakes Led to His Death
Joe Slowinski loved snakes. Growing up in Kansas City, he caught his first snake at age five, a black rat snake. At 15, he was bitten by a rattlesnake. He survived and became obsessed with venomous snakes. While a student at the University of Kansas, he was bit by a copperhead. He was administered multiple vials of antivenin and his thumb swelled to four times its normal size. Undaunted, he drove directly from the hospital to catch more copperheads with his uninjured hand.
In the book The Snake Charmer by Jamie James, Slowinski is portrayed as an enthusiastic adventurer who saw himself as a modern-day Charles Darwin. He loved telling people that snakes couldn’t kill him since he had “thick skin.” He received a Ph.D. in herpetology at the University of Miami specializing in elapids, a species of snake with neurotoxic venom. Elapids include cobras, mambas, coral snakes, sea snakes and kraits. Elapid venom is more lethal than the hemotoxic venom found in rattlesnakes, copperheads and cottonmouths.
Slowinski became curator for the Department of Herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences. He founded the first online herpetological journal Contemporary Herpetology. He published academic papers on elapid diversity and evolutionary theory. His passion was fieldwork. In 1997, he ventured on the first of 10 expeditions to Myanmar (Burma)…
