So-called experts have alleged for nearly a century (and maybe longer) that baby rattlesnakes are more venomous and more dangerous than the species’ full-grown adults. The first known instance of this factoid was attributed to no less an authority than the owner of Florida’s Reptile Leather company, Roy Montgomery, who claimed to the Miami Tribune in 1936 that venom from a “baby rattler” was “thinner and far more potent.” As if. Not a chance.
Unfounded allegations against these young rattlers have been remarkably persistent, according to William Hayes, a biology professor at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California. Hayes—whose new study in the journal Toxins tracked these claims—found that roughly half of college-aged students in the American West had heard variations of this deceptive myth. Specifically, about 48.2% of college students surveyed in the Northwest and about 52.6% in the Southwest had heard versions of the assertion that baby rattlesnakes are more dangerous because they “have not learned to control the amount of venom they inject when biting and therefore inject more.”
In reality, per Hayes’s ongoing research, the volume of rattlesnake venom deployed in an attack increases “exponentially” as these snakes mature and the length of their bodies grow. Baby rattlesnakes, by contrast, deliver less venom in their bites, whether during predatory or defensive strikes. And, contrary to wilderness lore, these juveniles can also control the volume of venom delivered in their attacks.
“We’re hoping to get the word out so that we can get this myth corrected,” Hayes explained in a press statement. “There’s no need for hikers to have unwarranted fear of baby rattlesnakes or to think they need to harm or kill the snakes.”
Hayes and a student at Loma Linda, M. Cale Morris, scanned newspaper archives for instances of these inaccurate, fear-mongering assertions about baby rattlesnakes, focusing on articles published between 1900 and 2025. Despite old Roy Montgomery’s 1936 interview, they found that this false information did not really achieve viral status until the late 1960s.
Admittedly, some of these sources do look credible on paper, including a naturalist with Arcadia Wilderness Park in Los Angeles and a local police chief. By the 1990s, the pair’s review of Newspapers.com archives and other sources found that state park rangers, a clinical pharmacist with a poison control center, and even the director of pediatric intensive care at the UC Davis Medical Center were repeating this fake news to reporters.
“Beyond the newspaper stories, numerous organizations generally regarded as authoritative further amplified the information,” Hayes and Morris wrote in their study. “Examples we found included popular television broadcast corporations; the Wikipedia article on Rattlesnakes; articles published on county, university, parenting, veterinary, companion animal, and wildlife removal websites; and a popular desert travel guide.”
While the Wikipedia article was corrected around 2010, they noted, much of this false information remains online to this day.
Hayes said the empirical evidence contradicting these pervasive scare stories ought to be able to make an impact on public perception. “This is an easily defanged myth that has generated dread, panic, and real-life consequences,” according to Hayes, whose work has focused on venomous snakes and biodiversity issues.
Both he and Morris hope getting the word out might protect domestic rattlesnake species, like the eastern massasaugas (Sistrurus catenatus) and the New Mexico ridge-nosed rattlesnake (Crotalus willardi obscurus). Both are listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.
“Rattlesnakes occupy an important role in the ecosystems they dwell in and in recent years their populations have dropped significantly in many parts of the United States,” as they put it in their study. “We also don’t want physicians or veterinarians to succumb to pressure from patients and families who insist on excessive medication after a bite from a baby rattlesnake,” Hayes noted.
So, to put this in a slightly more viral and hopefully mimetic way: Nobody puts baby rattlesnakes in a corner.
Source: Gizmodo