Quote:
Originally Posted by Vespers War
About fifteen years or so ago a friend's wife was killed in Florida by a pygmy rattlesnake. She was trimming bushes when it bit, it only hit with one fang and she never saw it, and the bite was misdiagnosed as a wasp sting. The dusky pygmy rattlesnake is one of six venomous snakes in Florida, the others being the eastern diamondback rattlesnake, timber rattlesnake, cottonmouth, copperhead, and coral snake.
In thirty years of living in Florida the only venomous snake I ran across was a coral snake, and that only once (I got a photo from a respectful distance and sent it to a herpetologist friend because I wasn't sure if it was coral or king). They're pretty timid and their fangs aren't directly connected to the venom duct, so they typically have to chew on things a bit in order to inject venom. Bites are rare enough that the antivenin stopped being made a few years ago because it wasn't being used (although checking up on that, apparently production resumed last year).
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And the small rattle snake make a buzz, it does sound like the big boys.