How to Get Bitten by a Black Mamba

Plan carefully, and keep your camera close at hand.

by Richard Conniff

A black mamba sinking its fangs into the photographer (Photo: Mark Laita)

For anyone working in natural areas across sub-Saharan Africa, mambas are one of those deep, abiding terrors you try not to think about and hope never to encounter in the flesh. They come in four species, all typically slender and six or seven feet long—though 15 feet is said to be possible for the black mamba, which, despite the name, is typically light gray or brown. (It’s black only on the insides of the mouth.) The other three species are mostly green, but no less deadly.

Despite their reputation, mambas aren’t particularly aggressive. They’d rather slip away if they sense danger, down a crack in the rocks or into a treehole. But they are also extraordinarily fast and highly venomous. Their bites—often multiple bites in quick succession—are almost always fatal, in the absence of prompt antivenom treatment.

Oh, and there’s one other thing: The green ones tend to be arboreal, working their way along the branches of trees and shrubs in search of birds, small mammals, and other prey. Crashing through the bush in an open vehicle on various stories, I have tried not to contemplate the possibility that one could come flying in my window at any moment.

It’s much worse for a friend whose research involves studying caterpillars by routinely beating bushes and collecting what falls out into a sheet on the ground. The possibility of bringing his beater down anywhere near a mamba, he says, “adds a different dimension to going out collecting bugs.”

Just to demonstrate how fast and brutal a mamba bite can be, check out this horrific scene from the 2004 film “Kill Bill: Vol. 2.” You may remember it. It may even be on re-run in your nightmares.

That’s Daryl Hannah as a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. Michael Madsen plays her victim. To gratify director Quentin Tarantino’s passion for authenticity, the snake that takes him out is a real, live black mamba.

We’ll get back to “Kill Bill” in a bit. But first let’s talk about the photo at the top of the page. It’s a black mamba sinking its fangs into the left shin of Los Angeles advertising photographer Mark Laita. Imagine being able to get that photo and in focus, as Laita did, at a moment like that. It’s astonishing, in so many ways.

When the photo first came out in early 2013, it went viral and caused a lot of buzz suggesting that it was a set-up, a bid to publicize Laita’s book Serpentine, due out the following week.

“It looks like a set-up,” Laita told me back then, when I got him on the phone, “because who the hell would stand there with a black mamba biting his leg and take a photo of it? The whole thing seems preposterous.” Now everybody’s talking about the black mamba bite, he said, instead of the book. “The whole thing is stupid, and it makes me look like a reckless jackass, which I’m not.”

It happened, he said, when he was photographing snakes at the home of a leading collector. With other venomous snakes, he had taken precautions. He photographed a king cobra enclosed in a plexiglass box. For the spitting cobra, he wore a mask, long sleeves, and gloves to keep off the venom.

But when it was time to photograph the black mamba, Laita said, the collector “was handling him like you would a boa. He was a really calm, cool snake. An old snake, not a young, excitable one.” So no plexiglass, and Laita wore shorts, he said, because the movement of pants legs might have startled the snake, and because “the worst thing is when it climbs up your pants leg.” Agreed.

After Laita had been taking photos of the mamba for a while, he said, the snake calmly started to circle around his foot and he asked the collector to take his studio camera and hand him a point-and-shoot. He began rattling off photographs. Then, according to Laita, the collector reached in with the snake hook to draw the mamba away. Instead, the hook bumped into a red cable which was hanging down, and that spooked the snake, which struck.

Laita wasn’t looking through the viewfinder of the camera, so didn’t actually see what had happened. But then “the blood was gushing out” Laita recalled, and I said, ‘Oh, fuck.’ He said ‘How do you feel?’ It had been a minute and I felt fine. ‘How’s your heart? How’s your breathing?’ And I said, ‘I’m not happy at getting bitten by the snake, but I’m fine.'”

They stopped the bleeding with a paper towel compress held down with a can of Red Bull, he said. There was a big welt around the fang marks, and the collector told him about a nearby hospital equipped with black mamba antivenom. But Laita chose not to go. He said that herpetologists have told him since then that this was incredibly stupid, because even if you feel fine, “something can happen even seven hours later.” Laita said it “hurt like hell that night. It was like being stuck with a couple of push pins.” But that was it.

I asked him then if the mamba was venomoid, meaning that its venom glands had been surgically removed. It wasn’t, he said. He speculated that an older snake might “bite without injecting venom, to hold it for something it was going to eat, and it obviously wasn’t going to eat me.” Or maybe whatever trace of venom was in the bite got immediately flushed out by the rapid bleeding.

Laita wouldn’t disclose the name of the collector, for what seemed like obvious reasons. So I wasn’t able to get a second source to confirm his account. But I was writing for a blog, not a magazine, and I decided to go with what I had.

The story elicited lots of comments, some of them from the most experienced wildlife biologists and herpetologists I know. They generally agreed that Laita had been “a moron” not to proceed immediately to the nearest hospital. They noted that venomous snakes can sometimes cause massive effects even 24 hours after a bite.

So why revisit the story now?

Here’s where the other shoe drops.

Early in the pandemic, years after I wrote that post, I got a call out of the blue from a Florida snake dealer named Jay Eaton and we had a chat. Eaton had established himself as a successful dealer in snakes and other exotic animals. His big break came when Tarantino was planning the black mamba scene in “Kill Bill: Vol. 2.” At the time, Eaton said, he had the only venomoid black mamba in the country. Authentic … and yet no one would die on set. The production flew him and his little friend to California, where Eaton also sat in as Madsen’s double for the direct-to-camera shot of the mamba’s strike. He suffered only a minor bite on one finger, while carrying the snake in a bag.

The “Kill Bill” scene boosted Eaton’s reputation as a snake dealer. “That snake was my 15 seconds of fame,” he said. (This struck me as a notable updating of the old Warhol-era quote, for our hyperspeed social media times.) In about 2011, he said, Mark Laita approached him for help with his photo book about snakes. They made a deal, and Laita duly showed up and went to work producing photos of eight or nine snakes later featured in his book, finishing with the black mamba, according to Eaton, “because that one was gonna be the biggest pain in the butt of ‘em all. Some snakes, you can do certain things to make them sit still … the black one doesn't sit still.”

The fact checks, from Eaton’s side, were (#1) that Laita hadn’t taken the mamba bite photo at the home of some eccentric collector, but with a dealer at his place of business. (#2) The snake was the same black mamba from the “Kill Bill” scene. And (#3) Laita knew that the snake was venomoid and that Eaton had been bitten by it on the movie set without harm.

So he “asked if he could get bitten and I said no,” said Eaton, who was worried about the snake first, “because if you pull away, the snake could break a tooth and get, you know, infections in the mouth.” And second, “God forbid there's just one little drop left in a tooth somewhere and it hits somebody, and now my black mamba killed someone in my facility ...”

According to Eaton, Laita asked to be bitten several times during the shoot. They disagree about what caused the actual bite. According to Laita, Eaton’s snake hook hit a wire and spooked the mamba. According to Eaton, “I knew, I knew he [Laita] did that on purpose.”

Eaton said he phoned Laita the next day “to make sure he was alright.” He didn’t phone again till the book came out, when Eaton saw that, though his snakes were included, his name did not appear in the credits.

“I was very upset, you know, and hurt,” he said. By phone, Laita told him, “‘I couldn't put you in the credits because I'm using a story that's gonna’—he told me all this—’a story that's going to help, you know, promote the book and everything. Don't worry, I'm not gonna mention your name. I'm not gonna mention this happened at your facility … If I would’ve wrote in there that credit is by Jay Eaton at the Exotic Jungle … everybody knows that you have a venomoid black mamba, and this wouldn’t go to my story.’”

When Eaton told me his side of the encounter, I was in the thick of writing a new book. The Laita episode also felt like old news. Why give what was essentially a coffee table book another round of publicity? So I let it go.

That’s bothered me ever since, partly because Eaton was telling me that Laita had played him for a fool, and me, too. He’d also wasted a lot of peoples’ time debating what actually happened to explain his survival. And he’d added to the bad image of snakes to promote a book that was ostensibly a celebration of their beauty.

Book publishing has always been at best a small-scale industry, built by people who love words, pictures, and print much more than money. Books by the best writers and from the most highly-regarded publishers are considered big hits if they sell 30,000 copies. Most books sell fewer than 1000. Laita’s book fell somewhere in between, selling 3,795 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, the standard source in publishing, with a spinoff wall calendar selling another 2,600 copies. Is that the big door prize Laita was seeking with his black mamba bite?

Laita, who is now 65, still has his photo studio. But he’s moved on to other things, mainly a podcast called “Soft White Underbelly,” which focuses on people who live on the fringes—sex workers, drug addicts, gang members. “These videos are meant to create awareness of things that are broken in our country,” he says, in a promotional video.

But Laita’s films have also resulted in accusations that he is exploiting his interview subjects—that is, playing them for fools. His best-known show, for instance, featured “America’s most inbred family,” and local people complained unsurprisingly that it perpetuated Appalachian stereotypes. Other critics have questioned the legitimacy of fundraising campaigns he has mounted for some of his interview subjects. Critics have categorized his show as part of the “poverty porn” sub-genre. Even so, people watch, a reported 618,000 of them a day. Impressive numbers.

I tried to contact Laita earlier this summer and again this week about the Jay Eaton phone call. I haven’t heard back from him. He is no doubt busy, and that black mamba photo was a long time ago. For now, I’ll just put my 29-minute interview with Jay Eaton here and let you draw your own conclusions.

And I’ll end with the same thought that came to mind at the end of my last conversation with Mark Laita: For some people, the old saying seems to apply: “The only bad publicity is an obituary.”

ADDITIONAL READING

Greene, Harry (2019), “Existential Natural History: Artist-Ornithologist Survived Possible Bite from Black Mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis, Elapidae) at Remote African Field Site, Died in New York Car-train Wreck,” in Herp Review, Vol. 50(2) It’s behind a paywall, a standard issue in scholarly publishing, but the author has kindly offered to provide a pdf on request. Email him at harry.greene@austin.utexas.edu

You can read about some of my odd experiences with wildlife in my book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time—My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (W.W. Norton). It includes some odd and arguably dangerous things I have done in the course of researching species— like sitting down in a pack of African wild dogs during a break in the hunt, or swimming with piranhas at feeding time, or walking side-by-side in a pack of baboons that were entirely capable of tearing me to shreds. Would I ever have allowed myself to get bitten by a black mamba for any purpose, much less to promote a book? No. I am not that kind of fool.