Doreen Saunders, age 12, of Braddock, Pennsylvania, for her question:

How many poisonous snakes are there?

Let's face it, some people can't abide snakes and tend to give all of them a bad name. If we pay attention to these anti snake folk we might get the idea that most snakes are poisonous and that all of them are deadly dangerous. This is not true at all and certainly it is no excuse to slaughter all the snakes in the world. Most of them are harmless to people     and very harmful to our enemies, the ratty rodents.

We share our world with 2,400 or so different snakes    and only about 200 of them are dangerous to human beings. Avery few of these are boa snakes that are large enough to suffocate a person in their coils. The rest are venomous snakes with deadly poisonous fangs. On a world wide basis, for every eight dangerous snakes there are 92 harmless types. In North America, we have rather more than our share. Of our 250 native snakes, 36 are poisonous. host of these are deadly rattlers. Naturally it is raise to learn to recognize and avoid the dangerous types but let's spare the harmless types.