On a recent Friday night, 7-year-old Daniella Cabrera was playing hide-and-seek at a slumber party in Quiet Waters Park in Deerfield Beach. She and a friend hid in the dark behind a cabin that backed up to a pond.
As she crouched down she felt a sharp strike on her wrist, looked behind her and saw a snake with a banded pattern on its back. The kids fled to the campsite in search of Daniella’s dad.
Daniella was crying when she reached her father, Michael Cabrera
The kids tried to identify the snake from the glimpse they caught and thought, based on pictures online, that it was a corn snake, a non-venomous snake with a banded pattern similar to that of a water moccasin.
With his daughter crying, and the rest of the kids still running around playing hide-and-seek, Michael looked at a picture of a corn snake on the phone and at her bite – two puncture wounds. But it seemed like corn snakes had rows of teeth, not fangs.
“I’m not very familiar with snake bites. I thought, let me calm down a minute. There doesn’t seem to be any swelling. Let’s give it 10 minutes. She didn’t have any symptoms.” Still, there was the unknown. “As a precaution, we went to the emergency room,” he said.
At that point he did not know if the bite was from a corn snake, or something worse. He just knew his daughter had two puncture wounds in her wrist. The drive to Broward Health in Coral Springs took about 15 minutes, and Naomi Reinfeld Cabrera, Daniella’s mother, drove in from Parkland to meet them there.
Identifying snakes can be extremely difficult, especially in dim light, said wilderness emergency medic venom response specialist Ben Abo, who is based in Naples.
Corn snakes and water snakes, both non-venomous and present in Florida, are so similar in appearance to venomous water moccasins (aka cottonmouths), which are also common in Florida, that “you can’t go by skin pattern or lack of pattern,” said Abo. “The only way to really tell is that water moccasins have a shield that goes over the eye, but if you can make that out, you’re too close.”
He said water moccasins also have a horizontal stripe on the skin around their eyes that looks like a mask. On a corn snake, there’s a similar band behind the eye, but it looks more like a big eyebrow in front. On a water snake, there’s no mask, just little vertical stripes below the eye. If you get a photo of the snake in question, those markers help, but in low light, good luck.
It’s a common myth, said Abo, that you can identify a venomous snake via a triangular head shape. “All snakes can flatten their heads to mimic venomous snakes,” he said.
At the hospital
When they arrived at Broward Health, doctors saw them immediately. “They’re looking at the bite and they’re like, you know this doesn’t look like a corn snake bite,” said Michael Cabrera. “This looks like more of a water moccasin bite because of the two incisors.”
They gave Daniella IVs to flush out her system, and measured the distance between the two puncture wounds, about an inch-and-a-half. That told them that the snake was likely a venomous adult water moccasin.
Though fang marks seem like a good indicator of a venomous species, a row-like mark is not necessarily safe, said Abo. Fangs could leave a row-like scrape.
But why no symptoms, especially considering that Daniella weighs only 73 pounds? Abo said that with pit vipers such as the water moccasin, “symptoms usually hit very quickly…you have progressing pain, you can have skin changes like blood blisters, which can progress. You can also have neurological signs like twitching and nerve pain.” Blood platelet levels drop, causing bleeding. There can be loss of consciousness and ongoing vomiting.
Daniella had none of that. After observation, the doctors suspected it was a “dry bite,” meaning the snake had not injected any venom, or at least not a full dose. “She was a very lucky girl,” said Naomi.
Abo said that one-fifth of venomous snake bites in Florida are dry bites, and that the idea that young snakes don’t have the ability to dry bite is a misnomer. Other vipers in Florida, such as timber rattlesnakes, also have the ability. “A snake has venom to hunt and eat,” said Abo. “They don’t want to have to waste their venom. They also might have just eaten – with different species it takes time to remake the venom.”
Abo said that with dry bites he keeps people under observation for 6 to 8 hours, in case of a delayed reaction. Daniella’s bloodwork was a little off, so doctors kept her overnight.
“My daughter wasn’t attacking the snake or anything. It seems the snake was just letting her know, ‘Hey, I’m here, what are you doing?’ Like a warning bite,” Michael Cabrera said.
Peak snake-bite season in Florida is April through October, but especially June through October because that’s storm season, said Abo.
As storms approach, people begin prepping, rummaging around in their yards, clearing loose objects, grabbing window shutters. And after a storm, people are clearing debris, picking things up, while snakes have been swept into odd places, and are hungry, looking for rats and other prey that hide in debris.
It’s not unheard of to have snake bites in January or February, though, Abo said.
The aftermath
It’s been more than a week since the bite, and Naomi Cabrera said the wound is now just two little dots. But Daniella is spooked. “She’s very scared of going outside right now. She wanted to go to the Renaissance Festival, but that’s not going to happen,” she said, since the festival is in the same park where she was bitten.
“I’ve lived here 40 years. I never worried about snakes. Nobody thinks about snakes. You’re thinking about alligators – people don’t know to beware of snakes.”
Michael Cabrera sees a changing Florida as part of the problem. “You’ve got a lot of development that’s constantly encroaching on the Everglades – West Parkland has tons of development, and there’s wildlife out there,” he said.
“It was a crazy experience. Thank God it was a dry bite,” Dad said. The Renaissance Festival runs until March 24 in case Daniella changes her mind.
Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.