SIAM SERPENTARIUM

VIDEO DESCRIPTION

 

 

Siam Serpentarium is an educative establishment in Samut Prakan that combines a snake museum with a snake farm and nursery, as well as with a thrilling snake show that takes place in an auditorium known as the Naga Theatre. The museum is an edutainment museum which not only educates visitors but also aims to give them an idea on how it feels to be a snake, with some of the displays set up in a surreal forest-like environment from the viewpoint of a snake. Explanation is provided on how snakes are born, hunt, survive and reproduce, often using videos and interactive materials. The snake farm has a special department for nursing, with real snake eggs and baby snakes, whilst the show gives a thrilling illustration of how snakes are handled and milked for venom. Siam Serpentarium is set up so that it follows a certain path from start to end. The show begins inside a large replica snake's egg, where visitors are shown a short educational movie on the life of snakes, with the inner shell being used as the movie screen. After the video, the egg opens up and the visitor, as if hatching from the egg, enters a replica forest-like environment akin to a newborn snake, observing the environment from the perspective of a snake, with other animals and objects displayed in extreme big sizes and thus able to walk underneath and between the legs of larger mammals, such as bovine animals, akin to a crawling snake. The next hall has displays of enlarged microscope models of the different kinds of scales that snakes can have, depending on the species, each model with a small framed piece of real snake skin that visitors can touch or rub to feel its structure. From here a giant edifice of a snake mechanically open its large mouth through which the visitor enters into the belly of the snake where videos and other displays show how snakes inject their venom into prey, how they unlock their jaws to be able to swallow a large prey and how prey travels through its elongated body and gets dissolved in the stomach. One corner at the back of the giant snake has a video on snake genitals, explaining that snakes, like lizards, have not just one, but two penises, called hemipenes. After leaving the snakes inner body, the visitor now enters a gallery with live snakes kept in terrariums. They claim to have more than 70 species of snakes from around the world. At the end of the gallery is the snake farm and nursery, which can be observed from behind windows so not to disturb the animals nor the workers. Finally, visitors arrive at the Naga Theatre, where it is demonstrated how snakes, such as some highly venomous Monocled Cobras and a non poisonous Mangrove Catsnake, are handled. The snake handlers also demonstrate how the venom is milked from the snakes' fangs in order to make antivenin.