It all started with an ordinary dinner in the courtyard of a house in Brazzaville, at the beginning of the 1980s. in the Congolese capital, the revelation of the place occupied by this animal, a source of both fascination and fear. An irrational fear which is above all due to a broad ignorance.
When Jean-François Trape turns to local libraries, he finds only a few dated scientific publications, but no summary work likely to quench his curiosity. He himself had never been interested in snakes before. He had just approached a few snakes in the Cévennes and read a book that made a big impression on him on how to catch the gigantic snakes of Borneo. The field of investigation that opens up to him is so vast that it seems impossible for him not to grasp it.
A specialist in malaria and borreliosis, Jean-François Trape has pursued in parallel, over the past forty years, his profession as a researcher at Orstom (the French organization which will become the Research Institute for Development) and his passion for collecting snakes. His field missions in Central Africa and then in West Africa enabled him to inventory 25,000 specimens thanks to an early participatory science program.
“I gave the village chiefs a 30 or 60 liter container filled with formaldehyde or alcohol, in which I asked that snakes caught in the fields or around the houses be stored. When I returned, three months, six months or a year later, we counted the catches by sharing our knowledge,” he describes.
A prevention tool
His Guide to the Serpents of Africa (a work of nearly 900 pages) is based in large part on this colossal work. The 370 species identified constitute the most comprehensive inventory to date. Each of them – illustrated by several photos and drawings – is described in detail, as is its behavior and its range. The families of pythons, boas, cobras, mambas, vipers, snakes, blind snakes and other worm-snakes parade.
The researcher for his part discovered about forty. Many of them in Chad, where the Ministry of Health, interested in its work, financed from 2015 to 2017 the distribution of containers and the collection of data in most regions. “Knowing how to recognize snakes and their dangerousness in countries where antivenoms do not exist or are financially inaccessible for the vast majority of the population is important”, explains the doctor, regretting that Chad did not have the means to deploy the extension program initially imagined.
Of the 370 species, less than 50 can inflict fatal bites, which the book indicates with one or more skulls. Because the ambition of this guide – the online version of which will be free within two years – is also to offer a prevention tool to those who would like to tackle this far from trivial health problem. The annual incidence of bites not followed by death, but sometimes causing serious sequelae, is estimated at 1 per 200 to 400 inhabitants in rural areas.
“For lack of knowledge, all snakes are a priori considered deadly. However, it is more often the remedies offered by traditional healers that do more harm to the victim than the bite itself, ”says the author, citing the multiple cases of plasters of earth that cause the wound to degenerate into gangrene.
The inventory carried out by the doctor with 25,000 snakes is not complete. Many species remain to be discovered. But future researchers now have a solid base to get started.
