Who remembers the Great Winter of 2013-14? Now that the weather has warmed up, the ice storms and polar vertexes have become a hazy memory. Wouldn’t it be nice to have this kind of weather all year round? But a tropical climate will come with it’s own fauna like the bothrops atrox, a venomous pit viper found in South America. Here it is, slithering towards a tent. Unfortunately, that particular te
nt doesn’t have a floor, so it’s no surprise that the occupant didn’t wait around too long! And it seems to be c
oming from the SansBug where the sewn-in floor thwarted entry into the tent!
Thanks so much to Dr. Ernesto Ortiz of Duke University for sending these pics. Dr. Ortiz is studying infectious diseases in the Peruvian Amazon. Here’s part of an email from him:
I just bought another SansBug tent, they are amazing! Very useful for the field. I take it to the Peruvian rainforest for our research fieldwork trips (very hot, lots of bugs and humid) and it even protected me from one of the most poisonous snakes of the Amazon.
Thanks to its floor, it prevented the snake to get into the tent, something that the white bug net did not have. As for the guy that was in the floor-less tent, he flew out of it when I woke him up screaming out loud that a snake was next to him and could easily sneak into his floor-less tent. It was a pretty scary moment to wake up and see a snake right next to my tent. Anyway, part of the adventures of working in the jungle.
Ernesto J. Ortiz, MD, MPH
Associate in Research
Duke Global Health Institute