Today is an anniversary of sorts. May 30, 1999 was the date I got back into snake keeping, when I brought home, from a pet store, a young female corn snake I named Pretzel. She wasn’t a particularly large snake, though she wasn’t a newborn, and she wasn’t particularly flashy: just a plain, ordinary corn snake with no fancy colour or pattern mutations.
Twenty years later, Pretzel is still with us, hardly changed from the day I brought her home. The Dorian Gray of colubrid snakes. I was going to say that she’s still going strong, but that’s up in the air at the moment. Right now she’s sequestered in a cage with a nesting box because she seems to be with (absolutely infertile) eggs; last week she had a few seizures that may or may not be related. We’re keeping an eye.
Last month a Peterborough, Ontario man was bitten by a monocled cobra (Naja kaouthia) and had to be given given antivenom from the Toronto Zoo’s stock at Scarborough and Rouge Hospital. [CBC News, Toronto Star]
The Calabar burrowing python (Calabaria reinhardtii) is an unusual egg-laying boa from central Africa. It’s a nest-raider that feeds primarily on baby rodents. Mama rodents tend to have a thing or two to say about that, so it turns out that Calabaria has an extraordinarily thick skin that resists penetration (i.e., from bites)—thicker and tougher than any other snake they compared it to, causing researchers to call it a “rhinoceros among serpents.” [Journal of Morphology]
Climate change may be making bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps) dumber. The National Geographic headline is a bit clickbaity; the underlying study suggests that incubation impacts social cognition. “Lizards incubated at colder temperatures were quicker at learning a social task and faster at completing that task.” The study determined that the effects of incubation temperature lasted into adulthood. The effect of rising global temperatures follows from that. [Royal Society Open Science]
Last week the New York Times reported on snake fungal disease, which has featured prominently in previous posts. A new study suggests that in the eastern United States snakes afflicted by the fungus “are both phylogenetically and ecologically randomly dispersed”—i.e., widely different species in widely different habitats—and that monitoring “should consider that all snake species and habitats likely harbor this pathogen.” This is, as they say, bad. [Science Advances]
Paul “Little Ray” Goulet is another old friend, and the proprietor of Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo in Ottawa. For the past few years he’s been offering free passes over the holidays to disadvantaged families who’d otherwise be unable to afford to go to the zoo. (Zoos, whether private or public, are a lot more expensive than they used to be.) Here’s the Ottawa Citizen story.
Finally, here’s video footage of a western diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox) riding on the back of a tortoise. Yee-haw. [UPI, YouTube]
Neil Balchan is upset, and so am I. The garter snake researcher visited a wintering den where he was doing field research only to discover that dozens of harmless red-sided garter snakes had been beaten and butchered at the site. CBC News has more.
Here’s TVO on the fragile state of the eastern hognose snake in Ontario.
And here’s the Great Lakes Echo on scientists’ efforts to track the elusive—and, in Ontario, endangered—rat snake.
Tiger keelback snakes are both venomous (it’s a rear-fanged colubrid) and poisonous, thanks to the toads they feed on. The snakes store the toad toxins in their nuchal glands. But do they know they’re packing toad toxins? According to a new study, yes: the snakes’ defensive behaviour changes depending on the toxicity of their diet. [Journal of Comparative Psychology]
Sean Graham has some advice for field herpers: instead of spending money and effort on finding rare species for your life list, they should spend that on field work that might actually do some good. “Imagine if instead of trying to find their lifer Pigmy Rattlesnake in Apalachicola National Forest, they instead went looking for them in central Alabama where records are few and patchy? If instead of herping for fun, everyone made their herping count?”1
Using the Internet to identify snakes is definitely a thing; I’ve gotten my share of requests. Sierra, the Sierra Club’s magazine, looks at how the Snake Identification Facebook group does the job. Turns out the challenges the group faces are as much about social dynamics—dealing with frivolous requests, not attacking people for killing snakes—as they are scientific.
So our 10-year-old female Okeetee corn snake, variously known as Little Miss Adorable, LMA and Ella Mae, started laying infertile eggs yesterday.
This is not unheard of — our female bullsnake, Lucy, and our leucistic Texas rat snake, Snowflake, have done this once or twice — so while we were surprised (February is really out of season for this sort of thing), we were not completely unprepared. Egg binding can be a thing, so we threw together a nesting box full of sphagnum and vermiculite, and then a larger box of sphagnum and vermiculite because her cagemate, Pretzel, wanted to curl up in there as well.
This does explain her recent behaviour: missing the last two or three meals (unheard of for a corn snake, except when gravid), restlessly pacing her cage and upending the furniture (much to the annoyance of Pretzel, who is twice her age and much more seclusive).
Five eggs so far, all infertile — she’s never so much as shared a cage with a male snake, and for good reason: corn snakes are the second-friskiest snake species known to captive husbandry. This is much to the annoyance of the (aptly named) Trouser, the male corn snake who lives in the next cage, who I suspect has been slowly going nuts about living next to two female snakes for years. But when I kept Pretzel and Trouser in the same cage, she would hollow herself out laying eggs that turned out to be infertile. The only surefire way to keep corn snakes from breeding is to segregate them by sex.
All things considered, infertile eggs — or, in the case of live-bearing snakes like garter snakes, egg masses — are a pretty rare occurrence. Caught us off guard this time, it did.
Update, Feb. 17: As of yesterday, LMA has laid an additional six eggs, for a total of eleven. Her backside looks appropriately hollow and she’s entered her post-egg-laying shed cycle, so we can stand down with respect to the risk of egg binding. There’d been some worry about that for a while: at one point it looked like had an egg just above the vent that was not going to pass.
