INTERVIEW: "Venom Doc" Bryan Fry Reveals The Hidden Value Of Dangerous Creatures And The Environmental Impact Of 'Pole To Pole With Will Smith'
- Sarah Angelo-Haight
- 18 hours ago
- 8 min read
Pole to Pole with Will Smith is National Geographic’s newest documentary series, premiering on January 13 on National Geographic and January 14 on Disney+ and Hulu. The mini-series follows actor Will Smith to all corners of the globe as he spends 100 days overcoming a variety of challenges your average person could only dream of experiencing. In doing so, and in exploring the big questions in life, Will is supported by a variety of experts in a large assortment of fields. One of those experts is Professor Bryan Fry, or as he’s better known in the wider scientific world he is part of, the Venom Doc.
Professor Fry specializes in venomology, which is the study of not only venomous creatures themselves but all the ways in which that venom can be used in helpful applications. He has published several books and papers on a variety of subjects relating to venomology, and he also runs an expedition and film production safety company called BFG Safety Consulting, which helps expedition leaders and film production companies remain safe while operating in high-risk areas of the world.
I was thrilled to get the opportunity to speak with Professor Fry about his background in scientific philosophy, the discovery and importance of a new species of green anaconda, and the best argument towards the conservation of our natural resources: economics.
SARAH: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I am a big fan of yours. My first question is you have a degree in scientific philosophy. Can you talk a little bit about what that entails and how it ties into the work that you do now?
BRYAN FRY: I think that it's much to the great detriment of the current generation of scientists that humanities, and particularly philosophy, is steadily being eroded as a core part of the training because look at what a PhD stands for. It's a philosophy degree. You're supposed to be a thinker, not a tinkerer, but so much of it, of the academic training nowadays is training and tinkering. It's not training and thinking, of how to push boundaries, how to shift paradigms. I really think that having a Philosophy degre definitely made me a better scientist.
I'm just mystified about why there's so much of a push towards just these narrowly applied fields and focal points rather than the broader Waldenian idea of walking through the woods of knowledge, and then getting and then sitting on that thorn that gives you the serendipity.
SARAH: It seems like that really does feel like it's missing in scientific inquiry these days, at least from a lay person's perspective.
BRYAN FRY: We're going to lose those blue sky leaps. The discovery of nylon was just a graduate student screwing around in a lab. The discovery of penicillin was actually an error where a grad student left a petri dish out.The development of Wi Fi was an Australian invention, and they were just screwing around with different radio signals and just playing. They discovered Wi Fi that way. You'renever going to get those blue sky quantum leaps by tinkering. You need the freedom to just play.
SARAH: I absolutely agree with that, and I think it's really important to keep pushing that idea of teaching people how to think and not just recreate stuff that's already been done.
BRYAN FRY: Yep, absolutely.
SARAH: That actually ties into my next question, where this expedition that you did resulted in discovering a new species of green anaconda. That's so cool. Can you talk a little bit more about the process of that?
BRYAN FRY: I think this is a great example of where studying of biology can have real world tangible impacts. The fact that the green anaconda is genetically distinct… [in regards to its sexual dimorphism] has an impact only among snake nuts. The broader impact of that is zero. This is not going to save lives in and of itself, but there's a unique aspect about the northern green in that it's the only of the anacondas that has an extreme sexual dimorphism. That was the whole idea and the hypothesis I did about using it as an indicator species for what's happening with the Wairani's ecosystem from the oil spills.
The females are the classic anaconda: 7 or 8 meters, 250 kilograms. Everything you'd expect from your imagination and terrible, but awesome, movies like the [Jennifer Lopez] Anaconda movie, which I still watch occasionally.
The male anacondas, you wouldn't even recognize as part of the same species. You'd be hard pressed to call it an anaconda. They're skinny little things built like an eel, and they're only 2 to 2.5 meters long and about 15 to 20 kilograms. That means they have a totally different predatory ecology. The females are feeding on grazers, like deer. Anything that's entering the food chain is going to be taken up by the plants, and then it's entering into the animal side of things will be through your grazers, whether like plecoderm fish on the aquatic side or deer on the terrestrial side.
So, females are eating something that's entering the food chain. They're eating it just after it's come through the first trophic level, but the males are feeding on other predators. They're eating arapama fish, arowana fish, turtles, frogs, caiman; they're a predator feeding on other predators. They're feeding up at the top of the food chain.
The idea that I had was that we could use them as sentinels, where if something has entered the food chain and is being bioaccumulated, then biomagnified as it moves up, we should see that in the males versus the females. Discovering that there's two different types of green anacondas allowed us to use one of them as a tool. [It] happens to be that the [green anaconda] in the Waironi lands is the one with the sexual dimorphism. So, what we did was we looked at what's happening with the heavy metals because the petrol chemical impacts, the long term impact are the forever chemicals, your heavy metals like cadmium and lead that have profound and terrible impacts on fertility, reproduction, sexual health, developmental biology, so fertility rates go down, miscarriages go up, birth defects go up, developmental issues in kids go skyrocketing… in plants, in animals as well as humans. The idea was to measure the male versus female anaconda’s accumulation of these pollutants and use that as a sentinel.
That's exactly what we found, that with cadmium and lead in particular, the two worst ones were in over 1,000% a higher concentration in male anacondas than females, which means that everything that they're eating on is a clear and present danger to the Wairani themselves. Clearly, pregnant women. When my wife was pregnant with our two kids, the first thing our doctors said after congratulations was, don't eat tuna, don't eat salmon. This is a well-known warning to pregnant women because of heavy metal accumulation, the potential for endocrine disruption.
We want to do more research, but we can already say to the Waironi, as far as a wild food safety guide, that in the very least, pregnant Wairani women should avoid eating arapama and arowana fish, or turtles or caimans because we know by virtue of the fact that the male anacondas have higher accumulation of these heavy metals that it's a threat to the Wairani themselves. It’s showing the intersection between basic ecology, basic taxonomy, which 99.99% of the world is not going to care about, but extreme public health messages that that 99% of the world will care about because the minute you start talking about male swimmers, you're talking about sperm health, you're getting people's getting people's attention and people start paying attention.
SARAH: It's interesting how that works. I did want to talk a little bit about the specific expedition that you did with Will [Smith]. What kind of safety considerations may have gone in for people who don't have your experience dealing with highly venomous creatures and environments like that?
BRYAN FRY: Will has a great ability to listen. One of the things that I really liked about him was that. It was ego-free. The premise of the show is that he's genuinely interested in science and nature. He's got a deep-seated advocacy for science and nature. His daughter Willow has a collection of boa constrictors and big tortoises, so he's familiar with these weird animals. The whole idea is that fish out of water bridge to a much larger audience and different kind of audience than I would normally be talking to.
I've done over 200 docos, but they've been the classic, you know, BBC. Natural World. So, with Will, since he was totally ego-free, he's athletic, he's sporty, he's strong, he can do this stuff, but he doesn't try to pretend anything that he's not. With the rope safety, he listened, snake safety, he listened and followed it, which is refreshing because I've worked with some other people that I'm surprised that we didn't have a chalk out line at the end of it.
SARAH: All right, just to wrap up, what do you think is something that people would be surprised to know about the world of venomous creatures?
BRYAN FRY: The example that I always use is they would be surprised to know that if they know of anyone taking high blood pressure medication, odds are they're taking a modified snake toxin. Captopril was developed as a drug 50 years ago, but it's still today a $15 to $20 billion a year market. There's very few drugs that have had that kind of staying power. Its economic, social, and medical impact is up there with aspirin. It's made from one of the most lethal snakes in South America, but a lot more lives have been saved by the snake than had been taken by it. It's an illustration that even if you don't care about nature, you need to want to keep nature around. When I'm lecturing at the university, I always have students ask what's the best message we can get out there of conservation?
I always say that your weakest message is to try to convince people that these animals are awesome. They're not going to think that way. If they were going to, they already would. Instead, push the conservation-through-commercialization angle that it's a biosource. It's a biobank. That gets people's attention.
I use the illustration that chopping down the Amazon is no different than blowing up an oil field with a nuclear bomb. You destroyed an economic resource. Angle that it's a biosource. That gets people's attention, the conservation through commercialization, people can relate to that. If you start talking about money and saving lives, you've got their attention. If you start talking about how beautiful the scorpion is, you've already lost it. The only people who are going to appreciate that are the ones who already think that way. You are preaching to the choir. You are not going to convince anybody new. But if you start talking about [the] economy, then, all right. We need to keep it around so you can make money. Anybody can understand that. Your elevator pitch is done in 5 seconds.
Pole to Pole with Will Smith premieres January 13 on National Geographic and January 14 on Disney+ and Hulu.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
