Reptilian romance was on many minds.

Hisssssss.

Slither.

Snakes by the hundreds. Sneaky little squiggles. Big sliding ropes of slippery scales, thick as a man’s thigh and fat with menace.

Tiny eyes a-glint. Forked tongues a-flicker.

Hiss.

Just the idea of being in a room full of snakes chills the guts of most people. Some would be paralyzed with terror.

Hatred of snakes is a basic emotion, probably antedating humanity. As other primates--gorillas and chimps, fellow descendants of our tree-dwelling ancestors--are taught to communicate with humans, most of them say something like “I hate snakes.”

Snake bias permeates human cultures. When ancient religions and myths wanted to embody evil, what did they do? They pictured the devil as a serpent. Dictionaries define “reptilian” as “despicable and malignant.” How do audiences express contempt? With a hiss.

All of which puzzled and saddened the crowd that came to the Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Recreation Center so they could be surrounded by snakes.

These people like snakes. They like their feel (“they are not slimy, they’re cool and dry and pleasant to the touch,” one enthusiast insisted) and are as fascinated by their habits as other pet lovers are by Puff the kitten playing with a ball of string.

The basketball court of the recreation center was filled with long lunch tables holding cages containing about 400 snakes and reptilian relatives--frogs, toads, turtles and lizards. More than 1,100 spectators paid $3 apiece, the biggest turnout in the seven years that the Southwestern Herpetologists Society has been holding the show.

None of the snakes were poisonous. “I’m sure some members have poisonous ones, but we can’t let them bring them to shows,” said Phillip Brown, the society president.

“We’d need extra permits from the city, and our insurance rates went from $168 last year to $303 this year anyway. Just imagine what the insurance company would do if we had deadly animals in here.” Insurance companies, the great kill-joys.

“Most of these people are pet lovers--researchers like me are the exception around here,” commented Steve Secor, a UCLA graduate student who plants tiny radio receivers in rattlers and follows them about the Mojave for his thesis: “Behavioral and Physical Ecology of Sidewinders.” One handy thing about snakes, he noted: They’re perfectly shaped for an antenna implant.

He displayed a Mexican hognose snake, which can rise up and spread its hood-like head and hiss threateningly “like a cobra.” If that doesn’t scare off an enemy, Secor said, “they play dead, just lay there upside down with their mouths open. And if that doesn’t work, they vomit and defecate at the same time--quite an interesting array of adaptive behaviors.”

The hognose, which eats toads, fixed a baleful eye on a nearby cage where a White’s tree frog, a pale lump the color of putty, calmly clung to a vertical pane of glass.

“Each toe is a suction cup,” Secor explained. “He can hold onto anything.”

“I have three just like him, named Carol and Mr. and Mrs. Dundee,” said passer-by Julie Walling of Arleta. “They have a lot of personality. They sit there on their little logs and fold their little hands over and they make this cute little face.”

She feeds Carol and the Dundees crickets and little mice, she said.

Mice appeared to be the most common topic of conversation. Many snake owners need a steady supply of live (though not for long) mice. The demand seems so great that Mouseketeers might have felt ill at ease.

Some owners were looking for mouse suppliers, others for new suppliers or better prices.

Jeff Fisher, a Thousand Oaks airline pilot, wanted to get away from raising his own mice. “They’re smelly. They stink up my garage. The mothers eat the young. It’s a big nuisance. I just want to buy the mice somewhere.”

Also, his wife, who already leaves the house when it’s time for the snakes to dine, “is threatening to throw me out of the house if I don’t get rid of the mice,” he said.

Fisher has four gopher snakes in a cage in the dining room, “in a real nice setting,” he said. “It looks real pretty. Every now and then I take them out in the yard. They climb the jungle gym and have a good time.”

John King of Sepulveda, a handyman, brought his yellow and black 7-foot tiger rat snake, whose cage bore a notation that the species eats birds and has “a very nervous temperament.”

Too true, King said, recounting problems with his nervous snake. “When I tried to feed him birds, he wouldn’t eat them. I tried rats, and he thought they were scary and tried to hide. Finally I tried mice--real itty-bitty live ones--and he just gobbles those up. Eats them eight at a time.”

He is looking for someone with a female tiger rat snake to breed, he said, a female who will not over-strain his pal’s nerves.

Reptilian romance was on many minds.

At the “have your picture taken with a snake” booth, adults and small children alike draped themselves with Jay Brewer’s 11-foot python and had Polaroid portraits taken.

Suzie Jacobsen, a slender, blonde 22-year-old from Anaheim, struck up a conversation with Brewer, a handsome Huntington Beach commercial fisherman. The topic: Would his python be interested in meeting her roommate?

She whipped out color photographs. “There’s my baby, in her little swimming pool. She’s about 6 feet. Really cute.”

Strange are the ways of love.