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Hi folks,
I saw the show for the first time myself on Saturday as well.
I was pretty damn surprised that they said I had discovered that the snakes were mutton bird feeders - especially since that has been common knowledge for at least 50 years - and I had told them exactly that in the production briefing!!
This was my second trip to Reevesby. On the first trip a group of us saw more than thirty tigers and 12-13 death adders in three days. We also went to Roxby Island a few kilometres away and saw two of the much smaller form of tiger snake that live there and feed on lizards rather than birds or rodents.
The NGEO shoot was done four months later in January which isn't the best time to see lots of snakes, and I actually had to work pretty hard to find the ones I did. The island is very open and exposed, and by the end of the shoot I was pretty badly sunburnt despite the weather itself being fairly cool (I was also pretty crook with a flu bug which didn't help either).
The answer as to the question of whether these snakes are a different species or not is contentious. Some researchers have the view that all tiger snakes are
Notechis scutatus; others split them into
Notechis scutatus and
Notechis ater; and others split
N.scutatus into
N.s.scutatus and
N.s.occidentalis, and
N.ater into several subspecies based on locality ...
My personal view based on the information I have seen is that the island populations of tiger snakes (whether on Reevesby Is, Roxby Island, Chappel Island or King Island etc) are populations that are certainly
on the way to evolving into distinctive species, but probably haven't quite got there (in the molecular sense) just yet. Give them another 20,000 in isolation and I'm sure they will continue to diversify into amazing unique lifeforms.
The bottom line however is that my role in sorting out these questions goes no further than collecting tissue samples and data for use by other researchers - despite the suggestions NGEO made to the contrary. All of my samples were forwarded to the South Australian Museum for inclusion in their collection, and to be available to other researchers - this was a term of the scientific permit issued by SA's wildlife authorities.
My major work continues to be the snakebite problems in Papua New Guinea, and trips to places like Reevesby Island are part of a small side interest in questions of biodiversity and elapid evolution.
Had I actually had any control over the post-production of the show I would have insisted that this be clarified, but apart from answering questions put to me by the producers, I had no real input into post-production or the development of the final storyline - and as I said at the beginning, hadn't seen the show myself until it went to air on Saturday night. As we all know, in Television there always seems to be a lot of
"artistic license". Nevertheless these shows are made for a general audience and i guess that if they further people's acceptance of the uniqueness and diversity of snakes then they serve a good purpose.
I just wish they hadn't used the word
"mutant" quite so liberally ...
Cheers
David
