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Joseph B. Slowinski">
Joseph B. Slowinski, an
expert on such venomous snakes as cobras and taipans who had studied
reptiles throughout the Americas and in Asia, died Sept. 12, 30 hours
after he was bitten while examining a poisonous krait snake in the
mountainous jungles of northern Myanmar. He was 38. Slowinski, a herpetologist
with the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, was conducting
scientific field research with a multidisciplinary team of half a dozen
other academy scientists and local support staff when the fatal incident
occurred. Academy spokeswoman Amy Cramer
said, based on reports e-mailed from researchers at the remote site, a
five-day hike from the nearest town, that a Myanmar field worker brought
Slowinski a snake to examine on Sept. 11. The small snake had bitten the
worker the previous day with apparently no harmful effects, and
Slowinski initially thought it was a harmless "mimic" reptile
with adaptive capability to resemble a venomous variety. Cramer said
that, although the snake bit Slowinski, the herpetologist who had
weathered several previous bites showed little concern. But within a few
hours, she said, his motor skills began to deteriorate and his alarmed
colleagues began efforts to get him airlifted to a snakebite treatment
hospital in Singapore. Myanmar forbids
satellite cell phones, Cramer said, and the team was eight miles from
the nearest radio. Despite the problems, she said, rescue helicopters
were arranged through efforts of the U.S. Embassy in Yangon and the
Myanmar military. Twice helicopters attempted to reach Slowinski, but
were forced back by heavy rains. Cramer said Slowinski's body
was cremated in Myanmar and his ashes will be returned to the United
States. The academy will schedule a memorial service at a later date. Since 1997, Slowinski had made
11 trips to the southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma, where
he had discovered 18 new species of reptiles in its mountainous jungles.
He was working to train local biologists in DNA, systematics and museum
curation techniques to improve conservation efforts. Slowinski's work was funded by
the National Science Foundation and had been featured on the
"National Geographic Explorer" television series, in
California Wild magazine and by San Francisco newspapers. Herpetologist's Death
Called Huge Loss Patrick Kociolek, curator and
executive director of the academy, called Slowinski's unexpected death
"a huge loss to the entire scientific community." Slowinski, who also had begun
work on an academy survey of the biodiversity in western Yunnan Province
in China, specialized in the evolutionary analysis of Elapidae, a family
of poisonous snakes with tiny erect and deadly fangs, including cobras,
kraits, coral snakes, vipers, adders, copperheads and rattlesnakes. "For a
herpetologist," Slowinski wrote in California Wild magazine last
year, "finding a new species is always exciting; for me, finding a
new cobra species is the ultimate discovery." The man who had described
himself as "obsessed with snakes, especially the venomous
ones" had a painful encounter last year with a spitting cobra that
shot a jet of venom into his eyes. If not washed out immediately, the
venom can cause blindness. As Slowinski screamed in pain,
his photographer flushed his eyes with water, and then villagers
squeezed tamarind leaves into the wounded eyes. Although the tamarind
juice caused more pain, Slowinski's vision cleared after a few hours,
the pain subsided, and he returned to Myanmar again this year. He estimated that cobras kill
about 10,000 people a year in rural Myanmar, and he suffered a "dry
bite," or one without venom, on his finger in 1997. He contracted
malaria on his expedition last year. Yet nothing dimmed his
enthusiasm for the isolated country he called "a visually stunning
place" that teems with Asia's least studied reptiles and
amphibians. Fascinated from early
childhood with reptiles and the occasional amphibian, Slowinski began
catching small snakes and frogs at age 4. He was bitten by a rattlesnake
in Nebraska when he was 15. Slowinski earned his
bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas and doctorate from the
University of Miami, did research at the National Museum of Natural
History in Washington and at the Museum of Natural Science of Louisiana
State University. After teaching biology at
Louisiana State University and at Southeastern Louisiana University, he
joined the California Academy of Sciences in 1997 and last year was
elected an academy fellow. He wrote or co-wrote more than
40 scientific papers and did field research in the United States,
Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Jamaica and the Bahamas as well as
in Asia. In deserts and jungles, he routinely searched out snakes,
picked them up with his long tongs, put them into a sack and took them
to his field lab to study. Slowinski was co-founding
editor of the first online herpetological journal, Contemporary
Herpetology, and served on the editorial board of Systematic Biology. He is survived by his parents,
Martha Crow of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Ron Slowinski of Kansas City, Mo.,
and his sister, Rachel Slowinski of Los Angeles. |
