diamondback_terrapin@yahoo.com
I never got to study them, but I did see a retic or two while traversing our highways. I saw many roadkills and a few live specimens that I believe were retics. Most of my snake encountere were with Asian green vine snakes (Ahaetulla Sp.) though. There was a significant amount of secondary forest next to our house when it was first built and I remember coming home from school once and my grandmother telling me that the construction workers had captured a 16ft. python and ate it. I never saw it though. My grandmother tapped rubber trees for a living at one point in her life and told of how the ground shook one day while she and my eldest aunt were out tapping rubber right before dawn. They heard a rustling in the undergrowth and turned around to see the hind parts of a huge snake slithering off. All the while, the ground around them shook while the snake was slithering off. My grandmother reported that it was as wide as a railroad track. I’ve more or less kept track of the number of snakes that devour humans in Malaysia. So far, this tragedy happens once every ten years, with the latest happening in ’98 or ’99. This latest incident happened near my father’s hometown where a man had gone out of his home to dump the trash. He never returned and his brother who was living with him at the time, later discovered a 16ft. retic with a huge bulge nearby. The authorities slaughtered the animal and discovered the man inside… I think retics can be very pretty animals, but I’ll take a diamondback anyday over a retic!! -Chun