King of Taiwan's Snakes--The Hundred-Pace Viper

"Every day at dusk, we heard a loud whistling sound from far off in the forest. The old folk told us it was the voice of the hundred-pacer. . . ." In Academia Sinica researcher Hu Tai-li's documentary film Sounds of Love and Sorrow, released last year, about the life of veteran Paiwan nose-flautist Remaleg (Chiang Chung-hsin), Remaleg's son Lavuras (Chiang Cheng-hsin) recalls the poignantly beautiful sound of the hundred-pace viper as he heard it in his childhood in his old tribal village. He also recounts that it was to imitate the sound of the hundred-pacer that the Paiwan developed the nose-flute.

Traditional Paiwan beliefs include many spirits. The hundred-pace viper represents a guardian spirit who protects the Paiwan in their homeland around Mt. Tawu. "It is the spirit of life, the greatest of all the spirits." Lavuras says that 60% of Paiwan folk tales have to do with the hundred-pacer. In the Paiwan village of Pingho, one of the two most important festivals was the Hundred-Pacer Festival, which used to be held once every ten years. "In our old village, the big tree under which the hundred-pacers lay coiled up was respected like a temple, and was seen as the seat of the tribe's soul," Lavuras recalls.

According to aboriginal beliefs, the only way human beings can live safely on this earth is in a long-term relationship of friendship, mutual sacrifice and mutual support with the animals. The Paiwan images of the hundred-pace viper in Lavuras' mind have never been menacing or sinister; they are mostly charming and beautiful. "Perhaps today we no longer believe in them as spirits, but they are still important symbols for the people of Mt. Tawu."

Other Taiwanese aboriginal peoples with a close relationship to the hundred-pacer are the Bunun and the Rukai. The Bunun call the snake kaviiad, meaning "friend." According to Bunun lore, if one meets a hundred-pacer one need only wave a red cloth at it and it will go away.

Taiwan's top five

However, among the Han Chinese, the hundred-pace viper is seen merely as a first-rate tonic medicine to boost male sexual powers. Paiwan poet Monaneng has written: "The hundred-pacer is dead;/ They've put it in a big transparent medicine jar/ With 'aphrodisiac' on the label,/ To tempt men wandering among back street red lights./ The hundred-pacer of our fairytales is dead;/ We Paiwan worshipped its eggs as our ancestors,/ But now they've put it in a medicine jar/ As a tool to excite urban lust. . . ."

The human tradition of eating snakes and using snakes for medicinal purposes goes back a long way. In subtropical Taiwan, with its many native snakes, there were once snake research institutes and snake shops everywhere, and people made use of all kinds of snake products-snake meat, snake blood, snake penis, snake skin, and snake venom.

The notions that one can best "fight poison with poison," and that the more powerful a poison, the greater its tonic effect, have long made poisonous snakes into highly valued natural products. One in five of Taiwan's 50-odd species of land snakes are poisonous. The five best known and most frequently exploited are the Taiwan habu (Trimeresurus mucrosquamatus), the Taiwan cobra (Naja naja atra), the Chinese green tree viper (Trimeresurus stejnegeri), the Taiwan banded krait (Bungarus multicinctus) and the hundred-pace viper (Deinagkistrodon acutus, aka the sharp-nosed pit viper).

Most of Taiwan's venomous snakes live in low-altitude farmland and sparsely populated countryside. But the hundred-pace viper, which was never very numerous, is at home in densely forested areas at low to medium elevations in the mountains of eastern, central and southern Taiwan. It grows to one-and-a-half meters or more-much the same length as the habu and cobra-but being far thicker and meatier it is much valued by gourmands. Since the snake is also sought after for its venom, it commands tremendously high prices. According to the report "A Survey of the Commercial Exploitation and Hunting of Taiwanese Snakes" by Lin Hua-ching of Taipei Zoo, hundred-pace vipers sell for three times as much as Taiwan's other poisonous snakes, and have been known to fetch upward of NT$10,000 per catty (600 grams).

During Taiwan's period under Japanese rule, injuries caused by poisonous snakes were a frequent occurrence, so in the 1930s Tu Tsung-ming of Taihoku Imperial (later National Taiwan) University Medical College began studying poisonous snakes, and started a trend of research into snake venom antiserums. Snake venoms contain complex combinations of enzymes, and as well as being useful for the treatment of snakebite, they have also been used as the basis for developing many new medical drugs such as anticoagulants and anesthetics. But due to their complexity, snake venoms are not easily synthesized, so they have to be milked directly from snakes. According to medical records of the time the hundred-pace viper caused more deaths than any other Taiwanese snake, so it became an important research topic.

Lavuras recalls that the largest numbers of hundred-pace vipers were caught in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. As the fingers of development pushed up into Taiwan's mountains and forests, hundred-pacers were forced into retreat everywhere, and in 1989 the Council of Agriculture put the snake on the endangered species list. The hundred-pacer is also the only snake species on the Council for Cultural Affairs' list of 23 rare cultural resources. Since then the popular custom of eating hundred-pacers has gradually declined, and by 1999 the number of hundred-pacers which the Department of Health's Center for Disease Control (CDC) applied to have caught to make antiserum had also fallen to 30.

Regal style

But is the hundred-pacer really the most fearsome cold-blooded killer of all Taiwan's poisonous snakes?

Chen Tsun-kuan, a section chief at the CDC, states that among Taiwan's "top five" poisonous snakes, the hundred-pacer in fact has the weakest venom. But its fangs are especially long, and it secretes the largest quantity of venom of any Taiwanese snake. However, the hundred-pacer lives in the dark depths of the dense jungle, and its numbers are relatively small. Not only does it take a goodly portion of luck for a snake hunter to find a hundred-pacer-the number of people unfortunate enough to be bitten by one is also very small.

One mountain lover who often encounters snakes on his hiking expeditions describes the hundred-pacer as "cool, calm and collected," and people who have kept or observed hundred-pacers also say they "don't lash out blindly." Hu Tai-li describes them as "really the chieftain among snakes-they have a serene, tolerant nature, and are not apt to attack people wantonly." Perhaps it is because of this regal temperament that they are revered as ancestral spirits by the Paiwan.

The hundred-pacer belongs to the viper family, which was the last of the snake families to evolve. Unlike the more primitive pythons and blind snakes, the vipers all have venom glands. Professor Tu Ming-chang of the biology department at National Taiwan Normal University explains that snakes evolved from hole-dwelling animals, and lacking limbs, they are less agile than most quadrupeds. Their vision and hearing are also poor. Hence their poison fangs are almost the only tools they have to catch food and defend themselves with.

In recent years, Tu and his research students have gradually researched the ecology of the viper species Trimeresurus gracilis, which is endemic to Taiwan, and of the Chinese green tree viper. But few researchers have taken an interest in the hundred-pacer, which lives deep in the forest and has limited distribution. Although it is an endangered species, lack of detailed information about such things as its reproductive cycle, preferred prey, range of activity and habits turns conservation efforts into little more than empty talk.

Cold-blooded? Not me!

It was only when Taipei Zoo began a hundred-pacer breeding program that people had the opportunity to understand the true face of Taiwan's hundred-pace vipers.

Lin Hua-ching, curator of the zoo's rescue center for amphibians and reptiles, says that the year before last there were six hundred-pacers in the rescue center which had been confiscated from a snake shop in Panchiao. Zoo staff felt that not enough was known about the snakes' habits for them to be successfully released back into the wild, and in order to have some substantive educational content to show visitors, they decided to start a breeding program.

"Snake Daddy" Lin Hua-ching says that as far as is known from observation of snakes in the wild, they live largely solitary lives. Their sense of smell is an important means of communication, and in the breeding season male snakes are attracted by scents released by the females. In late October 1999, the zoo began putting the male and female hundred-pacers together in pairs, and one pair took a liking to each other. The male gently courted the female by licking her head with his tongue. For the next three weeks the couple were inseparable, after which they gradually returned to their solitary lifestyles.

In February of last year, the female snake's belly gradually began to swell, and an ultrasound examination confirmed she was pregnant. In the two weeks after she laid her eggs, the female hundred-pacer protected them vigorously. Not daring to anger her, the zoo staff waited for her maternal instincts to subside somewhat before removing the eggs.

In August last year, as Taiwan was being buffeted by a typhoon, over 20 eggs hatched out into tiny snakes, which the zoo hopes can grow up safe and sound. During this first breeding session, for fear of anything going wrong with the pregnancy the zoo staff disturbed the mother snake as little as possible. But Lin Hua-ching says that next time around they will gather more detailed data, such as weighing the female snake every week, to make a comprehensive record of the breeding process.

Hear the hundred-pacer's voice

However, no matter how many hundred-pacers we can see at the zoo on future visits, it is obvious that we cannot fully understand them just by seeing them in captivity.

When Lavuras mentioned at a Symposium on Amphibian and Reptile Ecology and Conservation held by Taipei Zoo last year that the Paiwan used their nose-flutes to imitate the voice of the hundred-pace viper, all the biologists present said they had never heard a hundred-pacer make a sound.

Lavuras asked the scholars bluntly where they had seen hundred-pacers. If it was in the zoo, the snakes were away from their natural environment. But even if it was in the wild, with the great environmental changes of modern times the snakes might have been "struck dumb" too!

Whether hundred-pacers really do have a voice is an unanswered question of biology. But perhaps the aborigines' open attitude toward and involvement in the natural world, as revealed in their legend of the nose flute, is something even harder to imagine for modern people who received a rationalist education and operate in a mechanized culture.

Perhaps in this Year of the Snake, the hundred-pacer, just like the Paiwan people who also still live in close communion with nature, is singing us some long-forgotten songs of life-if only you are willing to listen with your soul.

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King of the snakes-resplendent in its pattern of black and brown triangles, the spirited hundred-pace viper raises its head alertly when disturbed. (photo by Lin Hua-ching)

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The hundred-pacer is the guardian spirit of the Paiwan aborigines, who live around southern Taiwan's Mt. Tawu. Striking images of the snake can be seen everywhere-in carvings, and on clothing and everyday items such as knife sheaths. (photo by Pu Hua-chih).

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The Taipei Zoo not only has cute-looking animals from overseas such as king penguins and wallabies. In the zoo's rescue center for amphibians and reptiles, curator Lin Hua-ching has created a "bridal suite" for hundred-pace vipers. Pictured opposite are baby vipers which hatched out in August last year. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

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Young Paiwan, dressed for the dance in clothes decorated with hundred-pacer patterns symbolic of their tribe. Their faces reveal a moving strength and mettle drawn from nature. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)