Watch Out for Gila Monsters

Watch Out! The Little Monsters Bite

"It's a cool day, so there's no need to worry about rattlesnakes," I tell my hiking companion, who is from France. "But Gila monsters could be a problem." His expression registers alarm. This is the first he has heard of "monsters" in Arizona. "What are they?" "Poisonous lizards. With a nasty temperament. They roam the desert in packs, and if you don't spot them in time, they attack in a swarm, clambering all over you to find something to bite. It isn't pretty." I've scored: the movie is running in his mind. His eyes are saucers. I double up laughing, then immediately I'm chagrined. I've done it again another killer Gila monster story sprung on an unwitting outlander. I can't seem to quit doing it; it's like an addiction. My friend growls something unprintable in French, and we move on. We probably should be watching for snakes. There are phenomena in the Sonoran Desert that can grim-reap you, but Heloderma suspectum is not among them. It is indeed a venomous lizard, one of only two such species in the world (the Mexican beaded lizard is the other). However, its venom is primitive, and it has a fairly unsophisticated method of supplying it to its victim. It is hardly monstrous; adults generally measure about 12 to 16 inches. It spends most of its time hiding out or hibernating in burrows pirated from small mammals. It does not hunt in packs. "To my knowledge, at least in recorded medical history, we've never been able to find evidence of a human death from a Gila monster bite," says Dr. Donald Kunkel, medical director of the Samaritan Regional Poison Center at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix. "The bites do tend to cause quite a bit of tissue trauma, and it's possible that 50 or 100 years ago, someone could have been bitten, not had the benefit of modern medical treatment, and then died from infection. But I don't know of any conclusive account of such a case."

Dr. Findlay Russell, a University of Arizona toxicologist, knows of one possible Gila monster fatality one "Col. Yearger," who was found dead near Tombstone after a bite in 1884. By several accounts, however, Yearger was an alcoholic "who had been on a prolonged spree for months," so the monster may not have been able to take the full credit for dispatching him.

Both physicians are baffled by recurring newspaper stories that keep inflating the nonexistent death toll. A 1981 article cited "seven known deaths in Arizona" since 1878; a 1988 story contended three in the last decade. "I don't know where they're getting these," says an exasperated Russell. "Believe me, if someone had died from a heloderma bite in the last 20 or 30 years, I would have heard about it."

It might at first appear odd for a reptile to have venom that isn't toxic enough to kill its natural enemies, but nature, as usual, is making perfect sense here. The Gila monster's venom is primarily defensive, and the species' long-term interests are served best by a sub-lethal bite: once bitten, a coyote, for example, learns that a Gila monster is not part of its food chain, and over time, that "knowledge" becomes encoded in the predator's instinctive behavior. Homo sapiens, however, doesn't seem to learn as handily as coyotes; every year a few victims find their way into Arizona emergency rooms. Kunkel says he sees about one Gila monster bite a year at Good Samaritan.

Even that small number annoys Howard Lawler. He is a herpetologist, curator of lower vertebrates and invertebrates at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and a tire-less advocate of peaceful coexistence between man and venomous animals in the desert. You really have to provoke a Gila monster to get bitten, he says.

"This is exactly what one will do if you approach it in the wild: first, it will pick up its pace and lumber away with as much dignity as it can manage. If there's any kind of a dark recess around, it will crawl inside. If it's cornered, it will finally turn around and face the threat and inhale and exhale forcefully while gaping its mouth widely. This is its defensive posture. At this point, anything that touches its body or comes within reach of its jaws is going to get bitten."

The bite, while not lethal, is quite an experience. Unlike the rattlesnake, the Gila monster has no hypodermic fangs with which to inject its venom. Ducts deliver venom from glands in the lower jaw to the bases of certain teeth that resemble miniature daggers with grooves in their sides. The grooves, which are saturated with venom from the gum lining, provide a route for the poison to work its way into the victim's flesh by capillary action. This is slow work, which means that the Gila monster is programmed to hang on. Fifteen minutes is common, according to Robert L. Smith's exhaustive guidebook, Venomous Animals of Arizona.

Experts agree that the victim's first priority is convincing the lizard to go do some-thing else. The method is under debate. Russell recommends shoving a strong stick or bar, such as a screwdriver, between the bitten flesh and the back of the lizard's jaw. Venomous Animals of Arizona also sug-gests immersing the Gila monster in water. In the desert, this can be a problem. Two researchers in 1961 suggested pouring gasoline into the animal's mouth, and added, incredibly, that "this may also be accompanied by the application of the flame from a match or cigarette lighter to the under surface of the lizard's jaw or neck." Sometimes, apparently, nothing works. A Wickenburg doctor once had a victim come into his office, the Gila monster firmly clamped to an index finger. What happens to the bite victim? "Severe tissue injury and an exceptional amount of pain," Kunkel says. "Many times they'll come in with low blood pressure and sometimes nausea and sweating. The last one we had was in excruciating pain; we had to keep him in the hospital for a cou-ple of days."

There aren't many good excuses for being bitten. Joe Prchal, a Tucson land-scape architect, sounds sheepish recount-ing his. "I was 10 or 12 at the time, and I was keeping one as a pet illegally. I was holding it, and my dog jumped up at it. I lost my grip, and it got me on the knuckle." Kunkel says his last patient had been in a bar in Gila Bend and was wan-dering around outside at 2:00 A.M. when he spotted the lizard. He tried to pick it up and won an expensive helicopter ride to Good Samaritan.

A few Gila monster encounters border on the bizarre. Kunkel knows of one in which a herpetologist was lecturing about Gila monsters when his subject nailed him, in full view of the audience. Russell has documented the case of a motorcyclist riding near Yuma who lost control of his bike, tumbled off, and slid into a basking Gila monster, which bit him - an I-should've-stayed-in-bed-today story that's hard to top.

In fact, the Gila monster has far more to fear from humans than vice versa. Gila monsters are poached and sold on the black market, says Lawler, even though they are a protected species in Mexico and every U.S. state where they occur (Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah). Road kills are an increasing hazard. Some drivers, adds Lawler, intentionally hit them, figuring that any venomous reptile needs to be killed. And as Arizona's towns and cities keep expanding into the desert, people keep being surprised when Gila monsters pop up in their yards and a frequent reaction is panic and revulsion. Every April and May, when Gila monsters' surface activity peaks, the Desert Museum fields scores of calls from people wanting to know what to do about the Gila monster at the doorstep. (Authorized agencies will relocate them or take them to the Arizona Game and Fish Department, which supplies them to zoos.) Cecil Schwalbe, former state herpetologist at Game and Fish and now a research scientist at the UofA,, says that when he gets such a call from someone living on a large desert lot, he suggests simply letting the lizard stay if there are no children or pets around. “Once they realize that the animal is of absolutely no danger to them unless they try to pick it up, they can be in for some great lizard-watching,” Schwalbe says. “I’d love to have a Gila monster living behind my house.” After some checking, I learn that my swarming Gila monster hoax is not unusual. No other animal in Arizona has generated so much folklore, exaggeration, and outright misinformation.

Those inaccurate newspaper stories may account for the widely held belief that Gila monster bites can be fatal. But what about the myth one hears this all the time that the Gila monster is poisonous because it has no rectum, so its waste is stored in its body? Or that when it bites, the monster will hold on until it hears thunder? Or that its very breath is poisonous?

In an 1890 story in The Tucson Citizen, one account reported, “A woodcutter laid down to sleep . . . they found him stone dead, and near his body a Gila monster.. As the body of the man bore no marks of a bite or other wounds, we must suppose that his death was caused by the mere exhalation of the lizard.” What spawns such creative nonsense? Lawler thinks it might be the lizard’s name. We expect a “monster” to be an aggressor; if it disappoints us, we devise a mythological behavior for it.

Jim Griffith, director of the Southwest Folklore Center in Tucson, also has noticed that Easterners invariably include the Gila monster in that triad of creatures that pre-sumably renders the desert uninhabitable as in “How can you live there, with all those rattlesnakes, scorpions, and Gila monsters?”

Watch Out!

monster in that triad of creatures that pre-sumably renders the desert uninhabitable as in “How can you live there, with all those rattlesnakes, scorpions, and Gila monsters?” Well, says Griffith, tongue implanted firmly in cheek, “It takes a real man to live in this country.” The more weird and threatening we can make our environment appear, the bolder we seem for coping with it. The myth of the ferocious Gila monster, Griffith suggests, is part of a continuum that includes everything from sand sharks to horror stories about the heat.But the nonsense, Lawler says, is not harmless fun not for the Gila monster. “It’s difficult enough for any venomous animal to survive around human beings,” he says. “Any exaggeration you pile on is just more fuel for the fire of prejudice.”