“It is just in my character to be brave and reckless.”
One day when Kate Jackson was five years old, her little sister unknowingly scooped a small water snake out of Lake Ontario and dumped it onto Kate’s legs. It was the first live snake she had ever seen, and Kate screamed.
“Our sensible babysitter scolded me for making such a ridiculous fuss—a big girl like me!” remembered Kate in her book Mean and Lowly Things.
The babysitter’s words made sense to her, and thus began her interest in slimy and scaly creatures. First it was frogs that grabbed her attention. She not only played with them, but she also pretended to be the “Frog Queen.” As Kate pored over pictures of all the frog species in the Peterson Field Guide of North American Reptiles and Amphibians, she gradually learned their names. Next she did the same with the pictures of toads, then salamanders, as well as snakes and other reptiles.
Kate Jackson, the Frog Queen.
Courtesy of Heather Jackson
Kate was born in Toronto, Canada, on February 14, 1972. Her father often took Kate and her sister to explore at a ravine near her family’s house. One day they found some toad tadpoles and brought them home in a jar of pond water. With their father’s help, the girls converted an old baby bathtub into a toad pond. As the tadpoles developed into adult toads, the girls observed each stage with fascination.
At age 12 Kate babysat the children of her parents’ friends. The father was a professor who studied sea turtles, and he encouraged Kate’s interest in herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians. He brought her to a Herpetological Society meeting, where he introduced Kate to adults who shared her passion. At another meeting, when Kate was 13 years old, she volunteered to be its secretary when no one else showed interest. Kate’s mother became fond of saying that she had never known what a herpetologist was until she gave birth to one.
During a high school career day, Kate spent time with the curator of herpetology at the Royal Ontario Museum. He showed her reptile and amphibian specimens carefully preserved in jars. For Kate, the most interesting were the forest cobra and a giant salamander, also called a hellbender. Each specimen was labeled with the species name, collector’s name, and the collection location and date. What was even better for Kate than seeing specimens was learning how to prepare skeletons of dead specimens donated from zoos. She set to work on a monitor lizard, cobra, and small crocodile. It was so fascinating that the rest of the day flew by.
After high school Kate first attended Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, where she took a part-time job as the tadpole caretaker in a lab examining the effects of zero gravity on animals. The next year she transferred to the University of Toronto to study herpetology. During the next few years Kate learned as much, if not more, about reptiles and amphibians from her jobs and internships as she learned in her courses.
Kate with a northern water snake, the species that started it all.
Courtesy of Kate Jackson
One summer Kate worked at a reptile-breeding center in Picton, two and a half hours east of Toronto. With training from Tom Mason, a zookeeper at the Toronto Zoo, she confidently took on the responsibility of caring for 70 reptiles. She rode to Picton each week, stayed in a rented room, and on the return trip with Tom often stopped to search for turtles, frogs, and snakes in swamps and ponds. On these informal expeditions Kate developed new skills as a field herpetologist.
Later that summer Kate managed the reptile-breeding center with two high school students and a pair of convicts in a work-release program as her helpers. During the following years Kate interned at an iguana farm in Costa Rica, worked for a summer at the Toronto Zoo, and was an intern at the herpetology department at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Here she learned how to operate an electron microscope, which she used to examine snake fangs.
Kate graduated with honors in 1994. Before starting her master’s studies, she accepted an opportunity to volunteer at a crocodile farm in Singapore. Mr. Lee, the farm’s owner, had two daughters, Pei Hui and Pei Lin. The girls and Kate quickly become good friends. Before flying home Mr. Lee gave Kate six baby crocodiles packed in a Styrofoam box; they would be used for her master’s research at the University of Toronto. At the Singapore airport an airline official refused to let Kate carry the baby crocs onboard her flight. Pei Hui and Pei Win and their friends came to the rescue by badgering the official so much that he relented.
Back in Toronto Kate studied the unusual sense organs found on crocodile skin, and after earning her master’s degree, she enrolled in the doctoral program at Harvard University. Her adviser was curator and professor Dr. John Cadle, who had a reputation as an adventurous field scientist. As a lone explorer he had been struck by lightning as he searched for snakes in Madagascar. In Peru a leech crawled up his nose while he slept.
“He was the kind of herpetologist I wanted to be,” remembered Kate.
In 1997, with one year at Harvard complete, Kate set off for another internship with the Smithsonian Institution, this time studying brown tree snakes on the Pacific island of Guam. By the next summer Kate was more than ready to organize her own research trip. The big question was, where should she go? Soon she became aware of the Congo, a country in Central Africa. “It was a virtual blank spot on the herpetological map of the world,” wrote Kate.
Here she hoped to make new discoveries about the diversity of the reptiles and amphibians of Central Africa as well as aid in the effort to protect those that were endangered. Her only fear was of being bit by a venomous snake. She was terrified at making the mistake of confusing a venomous with a harmless species, not only because of the possibility of dying, but also that her thesis advisor would find out that she had made a mistake in identification. With a healthy mix of innocence and courage, Kate traveled alone to a country where she knew virtually nothing about its culture, politics, or how to successfully collect specimens in the tropics.
From the minute she arrived in Brazzaville, the Congo’s largest city, Kate had her share of adventures. She had barely departed for the northern Congo to begin her search for reptiles and amphibians when a civil war erupted in the south. The pygmy guides she had hired at her research site became wary of her. While collecting a harmless house snake, she was bitten. The guides, who thought the snake was venomous, believed she was a witch because she survived the bite. But with their help her collection steadily grew—until one night when she tripped over a log and scraped her leg. The leg became infected, and nothing in her first aid kit helped cure it. Soon the infection was so bad that Kate feared she could lose her leg without medical attention. She was evacuated to a hospital in the neighboring nation of Cameroon; after she recovered she flew home.
Despite the abrupt end to Kate’s expedition, she was able to collect and observe 20 amphibian and 17 reptile species. Of these, seven were species that had never before been collected in the Republic of Congo. When Kate was awarded the prestigious Women of Discovery Award (in the category of courage) given by Wings WorldQuest fourteen years later, her father joked to his friends, “Kate isn’t brave; she is reckless.”
Reckless or not, after this first expedition in the Congo, Kate was ready for more exploring.
Kate carefully catches a rattlesnake with her class.
Courtesy of Kate Jackson
Kate’s doctoral research focused on the evolution of the venom-releasing organs and structures of venomous snakes. Her study revealed that snakes began evolving venom-releasing organs as long as 10 to 25 million years ago and that some species of harmless snakes evolved from venomous ancestors. For her work Kate was awarded her PhD in 2002, becoming Dr. Kate Jackson.
In 2005 she asked the curator of herpetology at the Smithsonian for funds to conduct an independent expedition to the Congo. Her plan was to collect the snakes and other “herps” in the flooded forests in the northern Congo for the Smithsonian collection. She was awarded barely enough money for her expedition but decided to go anyway.
From the start it was a challenging undertaking. After she arrived in Brazzaville, Kate’s first obstacle was an interminably long delay in being granted a permit to collect specimens in the preserves she had arranged to survey. As she saw her time for her expedition fading away, she decided to revise her plan and collect in a part of the forest outside the preserve’s boundary. Because this forest was under the jurisdiction of a small village named Ganganya, she had to get permission from the village leaders and pay them a fee.
Without the use of the lodging at the preserve, Kate had to hire a cook and a guide. With their help she set up a camp on the edge of the flooded forest. Life was not easy there; she endured torrential rains, stinging ants, biting flies, and unappetizing meals. Despite setting up nets and pitfall traps as well as training her guide, Etienne, and cook, Florence, to help her collect, Kate didn’t find as many specimens as she had hoped. Finally, by setting out more nets and encouraging villagers to bring her reptiles and amphibians, Kate was able to expand her collection. A little boy brought her a species of African clawed frog she hadn’t seen before. A local Pygmy man, Fiti, brought her other uncommon frog species and snakes.
One day they caught a six-foot-long water cobra in one of the nets. This venomous snake was too big for any of their bags, so Kate had to put it in her day pack. Kate’s clothes were constantly wet from incessant rains and the daily wading necessary to check the nets. Toward the end of her expedition her guide and cook became more and more unreliable. Food began to run low, as well as the lab supplies she needed for preserving specimens. Despite these difficulties, Kate collected 130 specimens. She also photographed many of them while they were still alive and was the first scientist to procure tissue samples of Congolese species for later DNA analysis. It was both an exhilarating and exhausting experience.
When Kate arrived at the airport for the flight home, the airlines refused to transport her collection. As Kate flew off without her hard-earned specimens, tears rolled down her cheeks. Fortunately, a local French scientist took charge of her collection and later shipped it to the Smithsonian. Kate was slim when she left for the Congo, but when she returned to Toronto 10 pounds lighter, she was practically a skeleton. But despite all of the difficulties she experienced, Kate began making arrangements for another expedition to the Congo in November and December 2006.
This time, Kate experienced her worst fear. One day while collecting from a village brick pile she mistook a partially visible forest cobra for a nonvenomous species. Before she was able to drop it in her snake bag, she received a small prick from its fangs. She didn’t know how deep the bite was, but snake venom was running all down her arm. Being surrounded by village children, who had been helping her remove the bricks, meant she was unable to just drop the cobra. Soon her hands started to go numb. Once the snake was safely in the bag, Kate rushed back to camp. There she instructed her assistant, Ange, to inject snake antivenom into her abdomen. Fortunately Kate survived the incident without any permanent injury. It was a scary and humbling experience. From then on Kate would use more caution as she collected venomous snakes.
Kate remembered these trips for their hardships, dangers, and loneliness but also for her new friendships and the kindness shown to her, even though some considered her a sorcerer. At the end of this trip Kate entered a new stage in her life by accepting an assistant teaching job at Whitman College in Washington State. In 2010 she published her well-acclaimed book Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo. In 2012 she and her partner, Andrea, became the mothers of a little boy.
Will Kate now, like her mother, raise a young herpetologist? Only time will tell. Meanwhile Kate is a nurturing mother, an inspiring teacher, and an occasionally reckless explorer.
Professor Kate Jackson plays Medusa with some garter snakes.
Courtesy of Kate Jackson
