Snake Smitten

Ph.D. student’s impaired vision doesn’t keep her from reptile research

By Jim Raper

Julie Ray’s deteriorating vision has left her unable to drive a car or use a high-powered microscope. But the Old Dominion University Ph.D. student in ecological sciences has not given up her dream to establish a center for the study of snakes and other wildlife in a remote jungle of Panama. During her Thanksgiving holiday, Ray returned to Panama, where she has spent a total of 15 months during the last two years, to do more field studies and advance her plans for a $1 million research facility in mountainous Coclé Province, about 125 miles from Panama City and the Panama Canal. Already, she and a few colleagues – including assistants she has trained from among the local population – have captured 667 snakes of 42 species, indicating that this jungle region may be one of the best places in the world to study snakes.

The 29-year-old woman has prevailed against great odds since she arrived in early 2006 at Panama’s Parque Nacional General de Division Omar Torrijos Herrera. She is blind in the center of her right eye. In her left eye she has lost nearly all of her central vision, leaving her mostly colorblind and with blurred remaining vision. She also spoke little Spanish when she first tried to explain to the park’s officials and residents of the nearby village of El Copé why she was there. Based on tips she had gotten from fellow herpetologists, she believed the park might be the snake-rich territory that she needed to promote her research.

Today, Ray speaks Spanish with ease, she has come to be known as the Parque Omar’s unofficial biologist, she is invited to lecture about ecology at Coclé Province schools and she has performed enough barehanded captures of her prey to prove that the territory is, indeed, teeming with snakes. Those captures, and the fact that most of them are accomplished at night in the jungle, have gotten the attention of locals.

“Most of the people in the community where I live (El Copé is about five miles from the Parque Nacional) think I am ‘loca’ for working with snakes. Some of the kids said I was a ‘bruja’ – or witch – for working with snakes and frogs, especially because I go out at night to do the fieldwork.” Her current main field assistant, Aurelio Gonzalez, sought her out, she says, because he wanted to be her guide. “But he had a fear of snakes, and it took him a month before he would capture one. Still, I really lucked out finding him. I owe many captures to my field assistants, but there are definitely nights when I out-catch them.”