Snakes alive – get the facts right
There is nothing quite like mass misinformation to confuse and mislead people about important issues that they completely lose interest.
I am not a herpetologist, but if I am not mistaken the snake that Dr David Williams is holding on page 5 (The Weekender, Feb 29) looks like a Papuan Taipan to me.
The snake photograph on the left (as the reader looks) at page 10, however, appears to me to be the increasingly rare Papuan Black snake (not a small-eyed snake) whereas the one on the right on the same page appears to me to be suspiciously like a death adder (definitely not a Papuan Taipan), a species common to the PNG mainland lowlands and some “kunai” areas elsewhere on the mainland.
I find it a bit off-putting that images such as these could be thoroughly mixed up relative to the facts, especially when the article in question appears to be a reprint of a previous one where the accompanying photographic images appeared to be correctly identified.

David Thomson, Port Moresby
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