Biology Reference
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seeing my father very pale lying in bed with a bed pan near his side. It was full of a dark black
current like colored urine: black water fever. I did not understanding why my strong father was
laid low and not responding to me in his semi-comatose state. As children we learnt to always
be on the lookout for dangerous animals, particularly snakes, crocodiles and hippos that
regularly attacked our workers or local Africans. One of my father's labors was attacked, as
he reminded me during a recent chat, by a crocodile that bit his leg while he was fetching
water at the Lomati River. He managed to grab onto a branch of a tree and hold on long enough
for his friends to get to him and hold onto him, but then the crocodile started spinning in the
water and twisted his leg off. By pure chance I was recently sitting next to a surgeon who as a
medical student at North Western University in Chicago in 1998 was sent to Shongwe Hospital
as an elective to study infectious diseases. While he was there a similar episode happened
with the patient losing his lower leg to a spinning crocodile. I still have the habit, particularly
at night, of looking ahead at the ground keeping an eye out for snakes, particularly puff adders
that like to lie on the warm sun baked paths after the sun has set, and will not move away when
approached.
They are also the fastest striking snakes, at about 20 meters per second (some 45 miles per
hour over 1-2 feet!). But despite threats from wild animals, what we all looked forward to,
was visiting the Kruger Park, which we did three to four times a year. We knew it like the back
of our hands, not only for the roads and vegetation, but where we were most likely to find
interesting particular animals and animal predator-prey interactions. This was the hunting
chase without the killing.
Puff adder in Cage, the World's Fastest Striking Snake
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