Reptiles Honor

The Pathfinder Reptiles honor stirs up a mix of fascination and fear that every Counselor knows well. All it takes is a lizard crossing the campsite trail for the whole Unit to stop. The honor turns that scare into knowledge, and its most valuable lesson is how to recognize a dangerous snake without getting close to it.

The full requirements of the Reptiles honor are in the catalog under code EN-011. Here they are summarized, with no answer key. The data were checked on October 6, 2026, in the sources listed at the end.

🦎What is the Pathfinder Reptiles honor?

The Reptiles honor has the code EN-011 and belongs to the Nature Study honors area. According to the catalog, it was created in 1937 by the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and sits at level 1, the basic level, with no earlier honor as a prerequisite.

Many Pathfinders reach it through the Companion class, the class for 11-year-olds. In the requirements list published by the South American Division (DSA) on adventistas.org, item 2 of Nature Study asks for one honor out of eight options: Amphibians, Birds, Domestic Poultry, Cattle Raising, Reptiles, Mollusks, Trees and Shrubs.

There is also the Advanced Reptiles honor (EN-057), a level 3 honor created in 2001, which lists this one as its first requirement.

📋What are the Reptiles honor requirements?

The catalog lists ten requirements, summarized in the table without answers. The version that counts for your evaluation is the one your Instructor uses.

Notice that requirement 6 mentions “fang location”. A fang, in this case, is the tooth that injects venom. The section on venomous snakes explains the term.

Summary of the EN-011 honor requirements in the Desbravai catalog. Check the full wording with your Instructor.

🧬What are the characteristics of reptiles?

Reptiles are vertebrates that breathe with lungs and reproduce through internal fertilization, as the OpenStax college textbook Biology explains. Their most visible trait is the skin, dry and covered with scales that combine keratin, a tough protein, with waxy lipids; together, they reduce water loss through the skin.

They are also ectothermic: the body's main source of heat comes from the environment. That is why you often see a lizard sitting still on a sunny rock, warming up.

The third trait is the amniotic egg, adapted to life on land and protected by membranes. According to OpenStax, this egg, which reptiles share with birds and mammals, is what sets all of them apart from amphibians. If you are also working on the Amphibians honor, study the two side by side.

Brazil is a great place for that. The List of Reptiles of Brazil, published in 2023 by the Brazilian Herpetological Society, records 856 species in the country, the third-largest reptile fauna in the world, and 404 of them (47.2%) live nowhere else.

🗂️What are the orders of reptiles?

Living reptiles fall into four large groups. Three live in Brazil; the fourth includes only the tuatara, found on islands in New Zealand.

For requirement 3, choose examples from your own region that you can show in photos. Caimans are a good start: according to Embrapa Pantanal, Brazil has six species, among them the black caiman, the yacare caiman and the broad-snouted caiman.

Be careful with the amphisbaenian, known in Brazil as the two-headed snake. It belongs to the squamates, but on a branch separate from snakes; it lives underground, eats termites and ants and has no venom, according to a text released by the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. The nickname comes from the tail, which looks a lot like the head.

Brazilian count: List of Reptiles of Brazil, 2022 update (Brazilian Herpetological Society, 2023). Groups: OpenStax, Biology, ch. 29.4.

🐢What is the difference between a freshwater turtle, a sea turtle and a tortoise?

All three are chelonians, the reptiles with shells, but each one lives in a different environment, and its body shows it. Many freshwater turtles even hide the head by folding the neck sideways.

Five species of sea turtle occur in Brazil (loggerhead, hawksbill, leatherback, green and olive ridley), according to the Projeto Tamar Foundation, which has worked along the coast since the 1980s. For requirement 4, pictures count: put together a board with photos of all three and label the legs and the shell.

Never buy or take home a tortoise or a freshwater turtle of unknown origin: without authorization, it is an environmental crime in Brazil.

Source: O Eco, Environmental Dictionary (2014), with ecologist Camila Ferrara; Projeto Tamar Foundation.

🐍How do you identify a venomous snake?

For Brazil's Ministry of Health, a venomous animal produces a toxin and can actively inject it, with specialized teeth or stingers; a poisonous animal produces a toxin but does not inject it.

In Brazil, the venomous snakes of medical importance belong to two families totaling 76 species, according to the Ministry of Health's Epidemiological Bulletin of October 2024. The 38 species in the family Viperidae have the loreal pit, a pair of heat-sensing openings between the nostril and the eye. The 38 in the family Elapidae, the true coral snakes, do not. In a 2025 article, the Butantan Institute counts 41 species of true coral snake in the country, in the genera Micrurus and Leptomicrurus, a slightly higher number than the bulletin's.

Fang position defines four types of dentition: aglyphous (no venom fang), opisthoglyphous (at the back of the mouth), proteroglyphous (small, at the front) and solenoglyphous (large, hollow and movable, at the front). Rear-fanged snakes such as the green racer, genus Philodryas, have trouble injecting venom, but they have caused injuries similar to those of a jararaca, Brazil's common lancehead, according to a case report in the Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Medicina Tropical.

The pit test fails precisely with the true coral snake, which is venomous and has no pit. According to the Butantan Institute, its venom is highly toxic and attacks the nervous system, and Brazil has more than 60 species of false coral snakes, some so similar to the real ones that telling them apart is nearly impossible. Some false coral snakes carry a weaker venom, and none of them should be touched.

In 2023, 34.47% of coral snake bites struck the hand, and the Ministry of Health bulletin points to a possible explanation: people handling coral snakes they mistook for false corals. Felipe Gobbi Grazziotin, curator of Butantan's herpetological collection, sees something similar: the accident almost always happens because someone went to handle the animal.

Anyone close enough to see the pit is already too close. Identification is for studying photos and keeping your distance in the woods. When facing any snake, Butantan's advice is to move away. If one turns up at church, at home or at the club's meeting place, call the Fire Department (Corpo de Bombeiros), Civil Defense or the local Zoonosis Control service.

Source: Brazil's Ministry of Health, Epidemiological Bulletin vol. 55, no. 15 (2024), Sinan data for 2023 (32,595 snakebite cases).

🚑What should you do if bitten by a venomous or non-venomous snake?

The Ministry of Health's advice is short: wash the bite with soap and water and take the victim immediately to the nearest health service. Call SAMU 192, Brazil's emergency medical service, and keep the person lying down and hydrated while help is on the way, as the Paraná State Health Department recommends.

Never apply a tourniquet or a tight band; do not puncture, cut, burn, squeeze or suck the wound, and do not put leaves, coffee grounds or dirt on it. The treatment is antivenom, given in the hospital and offered free of charge by SUS, Brazil's public health system. The Butantan Institute points out that no snake venom kills on the spot, so there is time to reach the hospital, and the sooner the antivenom arrives, the fewer lasting effects remain. Step-by-step care for other animals is in the guide to first aid for venomous bites and stings.

When the snake looks harmless, the response starts the same way: wash with soap and water and get medical care. In the panic of the moment, nobody can be sure of the species, and snakes considered non-venomous, such as the green racer, have caused symptoms similar to those of a jararaca bite. In 2023, Sinan, Brazil's notifiable disease reporting system, recorded 2,976 bites by other snakes and 4,373 where the type of snake was unknown. Do not try to catch or kill the animal: the person comes first.

✅How do you earn the Reptiles honor without the common mistakes?

Requirement 5 takes the most work. Start with the List of Reptiles of Brazil, which gives the species by state, and add photos from club outings. For economic importance, snakes help control rodents, according to the Ministry of Health, and a peptide from jararaca venom, discovered by pharmacologist Sérgio Ferreira, was key to creating captopril, a drug for high blood pressure (Agência Fapesp). If the house gecko makes your list, note that it is exotic, of African origin, according to a researcher at the Universidade Federal Rural da Amazônia (UFRA).

For requirement 9, the comparison is usually the better choice, because you can do it with books and photos. OpenStax notes, for example, that snakes have no eyelids or external ears and that caimans and crocodiles have a four-chambered heart. The terrarium option calls for attention to the law: in Brazil, Article 29 of Law 9,605/1998 punishes anyone who keeps a wild animal in captivity without authorization, or from an unauthorized breeder, with six months to a year of detention and a fine. Never take home a reptile found in the wild.

For requirement 10, look for the stories with a concordance or the search tool of a Bible app, using words such as serpent and viper, and practice telling two of them. As early as Creation, Genesis 1:25 speaks of “everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind” (NKJV). The article on nature study as God's second book helps connect the content to faith.

Mistakes that slow the honor down the most:

• Assuming a snake without a pit is harmless. The true coral snake breaks that rule.
• Putting the amphisbaenian among the snakes. It belongs to another branch.
• Getting close for a photo. Use zoom and keep your distance.
• Copying a ready-made list. The 15 reptiles must come from your region.

When you are ready, review the full requirements of the Reptiles honor in the catalog and schedule the evaluation with your Instructor. Next, the Advanced Reptiles honor takes the study into observing reptiles in nature.