Episode 952 of the Tom Rowland Podcast is my conversation with David Orin, the 25-year-old snake specialist known as @adventorin to his 1.5 million Instagram followers. On December 18, while searching for scarlet kingsnakes on the Florida coast, David was bitten on the leg by a four-foot Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake he never saw. He spent thirteen nights in the ICU, went into anaphylactic shock, and tied a hospital record for antivenom. This is his full story, one month later.
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On December 18, David Orin was bitten on the leg by a four-foot Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake while searching for scarlet kingsnakes along the Florida coast. He never saw the snake before it struck — he said it felt like a steel bear trap or an alligator clamping onto his leg. He spent thirteen nights in the ICU and sixteen days total in the hospital before being discharged.
David Orin received so much CroFab antivenom that he tied the record for the most antivenom ever administered at Shands Hospital. The first hospital tried to start him at six vials before he and his family pushed for ten, and bureaucratic delays meant he waited roughly three hours for his second dose of ten vials and close to nine hours for his third.
Yes. Within minutes of the bite, Orin felt his face go numb and his throat begin to close — an anaphylactic reaction he had no history of. He was roughly thirty minutes from the nearest fire station and did not have an EpiPen. Paramedics on his life-flight helicopter administered epinephrine, and he felt his breathing improve about thirty seconds later.
Orin believes the diamondback sank its fangs directly into the muscle on the front of his lower leg, and the venom — which evolved to immobilize prey like rabbits — destroyed muscle, tendon, and nerve tissue in that area. The result is drop foot, where he cannot lift his foot upward when walking. Some doctors attributed it to his decision to decline a fasciotomy, a surgery that current peer-reviewed snakebite literature says is contraindicated.
David Orin is a 25-year-old herper and wildlife content creator from the Gainesville, Florida area with 1.5 million Instagram followers. He grew up homeschooled watching Steve Irwin and Austin Stevens, caught his first black racer at five or six, and turned serious about field herping in 2019 after finding his lifer eastern indigo snake while delivering pizza in Newberry.
Yes — by the time we recorded, about a month after the bite, Orin was already back out herping. He now wears snake gaiters or snake boots in the field and encourages other herpers to do the same.
Herping is the hobby of searching for reptiles and amphibians in the wild — the field version of herpetology. Herpers target rare species the way anglers target rare fish, and the first time you find a species in the wild is called a lifer.
I had been following David's recovery on Instagram since the news broke. A guy who has handled venomous snakes nearly his whole life gets taken down by one he was not even trying to catch — that alone is a story. What I did not expect was how much his world overlaps with mine. The way he targets rare species, reads animal behavior, and builds an audience around a dangerous pursuit sounds exactly like what we do with fish and sharks. I wanted to hear the whole thing from him directly, not filtered through headlines. He delivered far more than I anticipated.
David never saw the snake. He looked down expecting a gator — they were thirty feet from the water — and instead found a four-foot diamondback clamped onto his leg. He describes the strike as a steel bear trap closing, then walks me through the adrenaline wearing off, the pain becoming unbearable, and a secondary reaction he never anticipated: his face going numb and his throat starting to close. The minute-by-minute account of those first thirty minutes, with no EpiPen and a long drive to help, is unlike anything I have heard on this show. Press play and hear him tell it from the first second.
This is the part of the conversation that stunned me. The first medical team wanted to start David at six vials of antivenom — he knew from his 2017 pygmy rattlesnake bite, which took twelve vials for a finger strike, that six was nowhere near enough for a full diamondback envenomation. He and his family had to advocate relentlessly, waiting roughly three hours for a second dose and close to nine hours for a third. He ultimately tied the record for antivenom ever administered at Shands Hospital. His explanation of why he refused the fasciotomy the surgeons pushed, and what the peer-reviewed literature says, is worth the listen on its own.
David grew up watching Steve Irwin and Austin Stevens, caught his first black racer at five or six with his mom's help, and spent three and a half years delivering pizza on the dirt roads west of Gainesville so he could herp between deliveries. Then came a four-day stretch in 2019 — a lifer eastern indigo, a Florida pine snake, a southern hognose, an eastern mud snake — that changed everything. He explains how that run lit up the herping community, how he grew to 1.5 million followers, and how 2024 became his big travel year. The full origin story is in the episode.
David walked away from the TV-style technique of pinning snakes and grabbing them behind the head, and he explains why he considers it more dangerous than it looks. His method now — keeping the head facing away at all times and lowering the snake the moment it turns — mirrors almost exactly how I learned to handle sharks on Saltwater Experience. We spent a long stretch comparing notes on reading animal behavior across species. If you handle any wild animal, this section alone justifies the hour.
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One month after nearly losing his leg — and possibly his life — David was already herping again. He talks honestly about the fear of seeing his next big diamondback, the drop foot he may live with permanently, the snake boots and gaiters he now wears, and the faith that carried him through thirteen nights in the ICU. He is not pretending the bite did not change him. He is also not done. How he holds both of those truths at once is the heart of this episode.
The day after this recording, I kept coming back to one moment: David, throat closing, thirty minutes from the nearest EpiPen, calmly deciding his friends could get him to help faster than an ambulance could reach him. That is a 25-year-old making life-or-death triage decisions about his own body while a hemotoxin works through his leg.
I have interviewed a lot of people who do dangerous work, and the ones who last are the ones who study their craft obsessively. David knew his envenomation literature better than some of the doctors treating him, and that knowledge may have saved his leg. There is a lesson in that for anyone who takes calculated risks outdoors.
Listen to the whole conversation. The story is still unfolding, and hearing him process it in real time is something you do not get from a headline.
David Orin, known online as @adventorin, is a 25-year-old field herper and wildlife content creator based near Gainesville, Florida, with 1.5 million Instagram followers and a growing YouTube channel. Self-taught through years of daily fieldwork, he specializes in finding and documenting rare snake species across the Southeast and beyond, and he is outspoken about safer handling practices and his Christian faith. On December 18 he survived a severe Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake envenomation that included anaphylactic shock, a record-tying course of CroFab antivenom at Shands Hospital, and ongoing recovery from nerve and muscle damage. He has since returned to the field wearing snake gaiters.
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