Snakes of Summer Cause for Awareness, Not Fear

Editor's Note:  Who knew that killing a snake in Georgia could be a misdemeanor?  Wow.  Good thing I always keep a wide berth!  No matter whether you adore the slimy creatures or want to shiver in distaste, it is most important to know how to identify a venomous species.  Take the time and learn-  after all, it could save a life!

As temperatures soar, don’t be surprised if you see more late-afternoon activity on your sidewalks and driveways, particularly activity of the slithering variety. Not to worry, though: Snakes can be a homeowner’s best friends, as long as you remember a few important tips.

First, snakes are best left alone. Most snakebites occur when a person tries to handle or corner a snake, prompting the animal to defend itself.

Second, of the 41 native snake species known in Georgia, only six are venomous. Although telling some species apart can be difficult, becoming familiar with the colors and patterns of venomous species can enable even novices to determine whether a snake is venomous or not, providing peace of mind.

The Georgia Wildlife Resources Division has several online resources intended to help the public identify venomous and non-venomous snakes and understand their natural roles. Some of these resources include the brochure “Is it a Water Moccasin?”, plus the guide to Georgia and South Carolina snakes at www.uga.edu/srelherp/snakes/index.htm. There is also the excellent reference “Amphibians and Reptiles of Georgia” available from the University of Georgia Press (www.ugapress.uga.edu/).

Non-venomous snakes such as the scarlet kingsnake and eastern hognose are sometimes confused with their venomous counterparts. Venomous snakes are often identified by their triangular-shaped head. However, many snake species flatten their head when threatened. Use caution when approaching any snake, and snakes in the wild should only be handled by an experienced person and after proper identification.

As reptiles, snakes are cold-blooded and rely on external sources to heat their bodies. In the fall and winter, you are more likely to see them warming themselves on rocks, sidewalks and paved roads. During summer, many snakes avoid open areas during the hottest part of the day and may become much more active during the evening.

About half of Georgia’s snake species give live birth. The young of all others are born from eggs, hatching within 40-80 days, depending on the species.

Newborn snakes can be seen from mid-summer to fall. Also, during summer, many snakes will leave their usual hiding spots looking for prey that may be found close to dwindling water sources.
Adults of many of Georgia’s smaller snake species are often mistakenly assumed to be newborns.

Although snakes in the state range from the eastern indigo, with recorded lengths up to 8 feet, 4 inches, to the crowned snake, which grows only 13 inches long, several non-venomous species commonly found in residential areas are small. These include worm, ringneck and brown snakes, which each average about 12 inches in length as adults.

All snakes are an essential part of Georgia’s wildlife resources. Fear or negative attitudes about snakes often stem from a lack of knowledge of their habits and role in the ecosystem. The majority of snakes found throughout the state are non-venomous, harmless and usually beneficial to man. A greater understanding of their importance as predator and prey often brings a greater appreciation for these admittedly not so “warm and fuzzy” animals with which we share our yards, gardens and forests.
If you spot a venomous snake in an area where it represents a danger to children or pets, you can contact Wildlife Resources for a list of private wildlife removal specialists.

Close Encounters
What to do when you see a snake in your yard:

• Never attempt to handle any kind of snake. If you are unsure of the snake’s identification, keep your distance
• A venomous snake will most often have a triangular-shaped head as well as elliptical pupils similar to cats’ eyes, rather than round ones.
• Snakes are important predators that feed on rodents, insects and even other snakes. There is no need to fear a snake in your yard. Simply give them the space they need.
• Despite the relatively low level of danger posed by venomous snakes many people consider their fear justification for killing snakes. In Georgia it is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail to possess or kill many of nongame wildlife species, including non-venomous snakes (O.C.G.A. §27-1-28).

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Congress to Consider Python Ban; Noted Reptile Experts Question Science

/PRNewswire/ -- Today a U.S. House Subcommittee will consider H.R. 2811 a bill that could determine the fate of much of the reptile trade in the United States. Introduced by U.S. Representative Kendrick Meek (D-FL), who recently announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, the bill could add the entire genus python to the Injurious Wildlife list of the Lacey Act; a designation reserved for only the most dangerous alien invaders to our natural eco-system. Such a move would prevent all import, export, and interstate transport of pythons in the U.S. The scientific justification for such a move hinges on a recently published report of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) entitled 'Risk Assessment of Nine Large Constricting Snakes', which paints a picture of large constrictor snakes on the verge of taking over much of the U.S.

Proponents of H.R. 2811 including the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) are quick to suggest potential environmental harm from trade in large constrictor snakes, and have hailed the 300-page USGS report as "erasing any doubt."

However, critics of a python ban maintain the science is simply not there to justify such a move. "H.R. 2811 aims to legislate science," responded Andrew Wyatt, president of the United States Association of Reptile Keepers (USARK), a national trade association advocating responsible private ownership of, and trade in reptiles. "There exists a scientific process at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to make these types of determinations. For sake of expediency, or political gain, Congress appears intent on destroying a viable industry and forcing reptiles out of the homes of responsible owners," added Wyatt. "The scientific basis for such an action is simply not there."

Over the past 60 years, the practice of keeping reptiles has changed from an obscure hobby to an incredibly widespread and mainstream part of the American experience. With over 5 million Americans involved, and thousands of small businesses, the reptile trade in the U.S. is reported to represent 3 billion dollars annually.

Dr. Elliott Jacobson, Professor of Zoological Medicine at University of Florida, and a highly respected expert in reptile biology also remains unconvinced on the science. "Although the USGS Report is an attempt to assess the ability of large constrictor snakes to invade substantial areas of the US, it is an oversimplification of a very complicated topic," said Dr. Jacobson. "The fact that the boa constrictor can be found in Mexico near the Arizona border, but has never entered the U.S. means there are factors operating that cannot be explained by this report."

H.R. 2811 will receive a hearing in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism & Homeland Security, 2141 Rayburn House Office Building at 10:00AM.

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Georgia Tech Study Reveals How Snakes Slither on Flat Terrain

Snakes use both friction generated by their scales and redistribution of their weight to slither along flat surfaces, researchers at New York University (NYU) and the Georgia Institute of Technology have found. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run counter to previous studies that have shown snakes move by pushing laterally against rocks and branches.

“We found that snakes’ belly scales are oriented so that snakes resist sliding toward their tails and flanks,” said the paper’s lead author, David Hu, a former postdoctoral researcher at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and now an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “These scales give the snakes a preferred direction of motion, which makes snake movement a lot like that of wheels, cross-country skis, or ice skates. In all these examples, sliding forwards takes less work than does sliding sideways.”

The study’s other co-authors were Jasmine Nirody and Terri Scott, both undergraduate researchers at NYU, and Michael Shelley, a professor of mathematics and neural science and the Lilian and George Lyttle Professor of Applied Mathematics at Courant.

The study centered on the frictional anisotropy—or resistance to sliding in certain directions—of a snake’s belly scales. While previous investigators had suggested that the frictional anisotropy of these scales might play a role in locomotion over flat surfaces, the details of this process had not been understood.

To explore this matter, the researchers first developed a theoretical model of a snake’s movement. The model determined the speed of a snake’s center of mass as a function of the speed and size of its body waves, taking into account the laws of friction and the scales’ frictional anisotropy. The model suggested that a snake’s motion arises by the interaction of surface friction and its internal body forces.

To confirm movement as predicted by the model, the researchers then measured the sliding resistance of snake scales and monitored the movement of snakes through a series of experiments on flat and inclined surfaces. They employed video and time-lapse photography to gauge their movements.

The results showed a close relationship between what the model predicted and the snakes’ actual movements. The theoretical predictions of the model were generally consistent with the snakes’ actual body speeds on both flat and inclined surfaces.

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Sniff, Wag, Sit, Snake! Conservation Dog Tracks Indigos

C.J. is all Lab: big, bad to jump on you, bent on chasing tennis balls.

Oh, and trained to find eastern indigo snakes.

On a recent romp in turkey-oak sandhills near Valdosta, the chocolate Labrador roamed the forest, trailing leash and handlers Kara and Mike Ravenscroft, and answering Kara’s frequent calls to stick a nose down gopher tortoise burrows and sniff.

Dirk Stevenson, an indigo expert with Project Orianne, a new conservation organization centered on conserving the protected species and its habitat range-wide, said a dog like C.J. can help pinpoint these rare snakes that wander far in warm months and often hole up in the bottom of tortoise burrows during cold weather.

“Even when they’re abundant,” Stevenson said of indigos, “they’re in low numbers.”

Eastern indigos are North America’s longest snake, reaching more than 8 feet. Adults can be as thick as two fists and weigh upward of 10 pounds. Their color is a striking glossy or bluish black; indigos appear iridescent in sunlight. Their diet is indiscriminate, including almost any animal they can swallow, even rattlesnakes.

But Drymarchon couperi has been federally listed as threatened since 1978. The snake’s historic range from southern Georgia to the Florida Keys and southwestern Alabama has been shredded by habitat loss and fragmentation. Populations dwindled as the non-venomous snakes were run over by cars, killed by people and gassed in gopher tortoise burrows, an illegal practice tied to rattlesnake roundups.

Using dogs’ keen sense of smell to pinpoint imperiled wildlife such as the eastern indigo is a growing practice. Conservation canines have been used to find everything from a threatened lupine in Oregon to brown tree snakes in Guam. C.J.’s resume already lists spider monkeys in Nicaragua and bats in Texas, plus a trained aversion to rattlesnakes.

Project Orianne rented the retriever from PackLeader Dog Training of Washington to explore survey methods for indigos, which are also listed state-listed in Georgia as threatened. C.J. didn’t disappoint, finding live snakes and shed skins. His “alert” for each discovery begins with what Stevenson calls a “slappy” tail and ends in a sit.

“He has … come onto the trail of a snake and gone as far as 200 meters to find (the snake),” Stevenson said.

This cold day spent searching likely indigo sites on private property yielded some excited looks but no alerts. Yet, Georgia Wildlife Resources Division staff including Nongame Conservation Section program manager Matt Elliott had a chance to watch C.J. work, making a cursory check of areas where indigos have not been documented.

Conservation of indigos and key habitats such as the longleaf pine sandhills in Georgia’s Coastal Plain are priorities in the State Wildlife Action Plan, a comprehensive strategy guiding Wildlife Resources efforts to conserve biological diversity. A recently announced DNR project funded in part by a Wal-Mart Foundation grant will help train Georgia teachers about sandhills habitats and wildlife. The grant was to The Environmental Resources Network, a nonprofit that supports DNR’s nongame work.

The Nongame Conservation Section receives no state funds to help conserve wildlife not legally hunted, fished for or trapped, as well as rare plants and natural habitats. The work depends instead on grants, private support and fundraisers such as sales of the bald eagle and ruby-throated hummingbird license plates and donations to the Give Wildlife a Chance state income tax checkoff.

C.J.’s outlook is less complex: Find a snake; get to retrieve a ball.

At day’s end, Kara, who with her husband Mike was working for Project Orianne, even coaxed the dog to sit for a photograph.

Asked about the biggest challenge in working with C.J., she responded with a laugh, “Getting him to cooperate.”

EASTERN INDIGOS …

· Are sometimes confused with black racers, the indigo's slimmer, smaller, faster and much more abundant cousin.
· Are closely tied in Georgia to the Coastal Plain’s longleaf pine sandhills, where the snakes depend on gopher tortoise burrows for shelter in winter.
· Often return to the same gopher tortoise colonies and sometimes even the same burrows each winter, often traveling near-identical routes. (A University of Georgia student doing research for the DNR found that one male indigo followed the same course even though part of the area had since been clearcut).
· Are diurnal, or active mostly by day.
· Range far and wide. A recent study in Georgia determined that some males’ home ranges exceed 3,000 acres.
· Are non-venomous and often eat venomous snakes such as rattlers and cottonmouths.
· Are protected by federal and state law: Harming an indigo is a federal offense.

Sources include Amphibians and Reptiles of Georgia

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World’s Largest Snake Discovered in Fossilized Rainforest

Sixty million years before Jennifer Lopez starred in the film “Anaconda,” the world’s biggest snake slithered around northern South America. Excavations in Colombia co-organized by Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History, unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species named Titanoboa cerrejonensis.

Surrounded by huge trucks extracting coal from Cerrejon, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, researchers discovered fossilized bones of super-sized snakes and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, in the Cerrejon Formation, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in the Americas, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago.

Jason Head, the lead author of the new species description in the journal Nature, is a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Head, with David Polly, associate professor of geosciences at Indiana University, used the ratio between vertebral size and the length of existing snakes to estimate that this boa-like snake must have reached 13 meters (42 feet) in length and weighed more than a ton. Titanoboa, as it is now called, is the largest snake ever known, and was the largest non-marine vertebrate from the epoch immediately following the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. “The discovery of Titanoboa challenges our understanding of past climates and environments, as well as the biological limitations on the evolution of giant snakes.” said Head “This shows how much more information about the history of Earth there is to glean from a resource like the reptile fossil record.”

Titanoboa’s size indicates that it lived in an environment where the average yearly temperature was 30-34 degrees Celsius. This estimate coincides with paleoclimatic models predicting greenhouse conditions. “This temperature estimate is much hotter than modern temperatures in tropical rainforests anywhere in the world. The fossil floras that the Smithsonian has been collecting in Cerrejon for many years indicate that the area was a tropical rainforest. That means that tropical rainforests could exist at temperatures 3-4 degrees Celsius hotter than modern tropical rainforests experience,” said Jaramillo.

Support for this research comes from the National Science Foundation, Fondo para Investigaciones del Banco de la Republica de Colombia, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Paleobiology Fund, the Florida Museum of Natural History, a Geological Society of America Graduate Student Research Grant and a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant and the Cerrejon Coal Mine.

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Snakes Move In As Foreclosures Mount

(NAPSI)-As if the home-foreclosure mess wasn't bad enough, now there's a new twist to worry about: snakes.

Communities in states like Florida, California, New York, Virginia and Ohio have seen sharp rises in the amount of wildlife-everything from snakes to rats to bees-infesting abandoned properties since the home mortgage crisis began playing out. That's because as people lose their homes, the abandoned properties often go unmanaged. As a result, walls become moldy, swimming pools sit untreated, grass and weeds grow wild and animals soon move in.

And with some analysts predicting that as many as 2.8 million homeowners could wind up losing their homes to foreclosure by the end of 2009, the problem is only likely to get worse.

"Anything that's not maintained creates a potential attraction for a lot of opportunistic wildlife," Scott McCombe, general manager for Critter Control of Northern Virginia, told The Washington Post regarding the problems he's been seeing.

In Brevard County, Fla., for example, 235 new cases of overgrown, abandoned lots have left remaining residents deeply concerned about potential danger to their families.

"I've got grandkids-I have to worry about a snake biting them," says Sara Peterson, who lives next door to one of the foreclosed and abandoned houses. "It's really sad."

Meanwhile, California residents have been warned about a growing risk of West Nile disease as abandoned pools on foreclosed properties become mosquito breeding grounds.

Clearly, part of the $300 billion housing bill recently signed into law by President Bush is intended to address the situation. A total of $3.9 billion was specifically earmarked for communities to fix up foreclosed properties causing blight.

So what's a homeowner to do if confronted by a snake?

"Stay alert and stay away from the snake-don't try to capture or remove it," advises Dr. Rutherfoord Rose of VCU Medical Center and director of Virginia Poison Center in Richmond, Va. He offers these additional tips:

• If you're bitten, contact your local poison center at (800) 222-1222 for advice on hospital care. Immobilize the limb and keep it elevated until you get to the closest hospital.

• In high grass or areas with debris that snakes may be hiding under, make noise so you don't surprise them.

• Wear high-cut boots and long pants for protection when doing yard work.

Finally, never try to suck snake venom out of a wound since it's only likely to make things worse.

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Gators and Snakes, and Oh My!

It's been a few years since we had stopped to tour the Edisto Island Serpentarium on Edisto Island, South Carolina. So, on this trip, we came back for an encore visit. What a treat this place is. That is, if you are interested in learning about snakes and reptiles!

While I am not a personal fan of these slithery creatures or the prehistoric looking reptiles, I can appreciate their beauty and niche in the world.

The Edisto Island Serpentarium is a family owned operation and worth a stop. The owners truly care about the animals and teaching others about conservation in the ACE basin. If I remember correctly, their collection of alligators all have local roots. These guys are not afraid to go and catch them, or to teach others. Feeding time is interesting as the alligators see the owner with the bucket of treats and literally all line up for feeding. It's truly amazing to see how fast these guys can move when there is food involved. I do have to admit the close proximity of these guys to my family did make my tummy get a little queasy.

In addition to the alligators, there are plenty of snakes to view. Some are in some really big pits just kind of lying around. That is, I hope they are! It was surprising to realize that their snakes can also get dirty and have to have their open pits cleaned. One of the pits was closed on this particular visit until they could finish cleaning it out. No matter as there are plenty of others to see.

There is also the snake show which teaches the visitors about these creatures. Once again, I have to sit on the back row, but I always see it. As much as I am not a fan of the snakes, I do understand the need to be able to distinguish between the good and the bad boys.

The guys at the Serpentarium not only care for the animals, they also collect the venom so anti-venom can be made. Good job, mates!


There are also plenty of iguanas on display. These overgrown lizards don't hurt anyone (that I know of) and are rather prehistoric looking in their own right.

When you are in the area, take a break from the beach and spend a few hours at the Serpentarium. You'll come out knowing a little more about these animals. Perhaps, you'll even appreciate their watchful beady, oh I mean beautiful, eyes.

I'm proud to say that we came out with all of our fingers and toes intact!

Until next time,
Sandy Toes
While on Edisto

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Snakes Alive at Sprewell Bluff State Park

Have you ever wondered what kind of snakes live around middle Georgia? Are they all that bad? What purpose do they serve? At 5:00 pm, July 12, bring a picnic dinner and a blanket, and spread out on the cool grass as Southeastern Reptile Rescue presents “The Snakes of Georgia”. Lean about all our native snakes, including Copperheads, Rattlesnakes, and Cottonmouths. Jason Clark, the founder and main presenter for Southeastern Reptile Rescue, will bring the snakes out and explain the importance of snakes in a healthy ecosystem, as well as demonstrate that even the snakes with the worst reputations, are not inclined to bite a person.

This program is free to all attendees, but there is a $3.00 park pass fee upon entry to the park, that will be collected by the boat ramp parking area. The program will take place in the main parking area, in an open area of the park near the playground. After the program, the members of Southeastern Reptile Rescue will allow any visitors to pose for pictures with certain non-venomous snakes, including an 80 pound Burmese Python. Photo purchases will go toward Southeastern Reptile Rescue, a non-profit education and rescue organization.
For more information on this program, please call the Sprewell Bluff State Park Office at 706-646-6026, or stop by and talk to a ranger. For more information of Sprewell Bluff, or any other state park, check www.gastateparks.org.