When It Comes to Greening the Desert, Rattlesnakes May Be Prolific Gardeners
Evolutionary ecologist Gordon Schuett has been working with rattlesnakes since he was 15 years old. When the 68-year-old was in high school in Ohio, he kept somewhere between 50 to 100 snakes, many of them venomous, in his mom’s basement. Copperheads and rattlesnakes moved under heat lamps in 10- and 20-gallon aquariums sitting on racks Schuett built with two-by-fours. His mother, a nurse, understood the risks and still encouraged her son to follow his passion to study the animals. “She could see the fire in my belly to be a scientist, even at a very young age,” says Schuett. “Is it for everybody? No.”
In the 1970s, she had taken her son to see herpetologist Bill Haast extract venom from cobras at the Miami Serpentarium, and the youngster knew from that point on he wanted to be a professor. While still in high school, he started collecting data on copperheads for his master’s thesis, which included work on long-term sperm storage in females and male-to-male fighting.