![]() A camera kept track of the snakes' movements. He placed sets of 10 snakes, each with a colored dot on its head, in a walled enclosure less than 1 meter per side. Because few researchers had looked at snakes, Skinner decided to test 40 young eastern garter snakes ( Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis) to assess their personalities and social preferences. To learn how socializing affects individual animals, comparative psychologist Noam Miller and his graduate student Morgan Skinner at Wilfrid Laurier University have started to study a wide range of species, figuring that different animals may have different ways of interacting in groups. This new study and others, he adds, are lifting that veil of secrecy and "revealing snakes to be cognitive beings." "Snakes are really difficult to study due to their secretive nature," says University of Witwatersrand herpetologist Graham Alexander, who was not involved with the research. Researchers have discovered that garter snakes not only prefer to hang out together, but also seem to have "friends" with whom they spend much of their time. Not so garter snakes, the harmless serpents that live throughout North America and part of Central America. So, what's the proper response if you're fortunate enough to spot a big ball o' snakes on your morning walk? "I'd shoot some video of it," Beane suggests.Snakes should be good at social distancing, at least according to what we know about reptiles: Most are solitary creatures that come together to mate and hibernate, but not much else. ![]() "If you mess with a water snake, if you pick it up, they'll usually bite, but that's not aggression, that's self-defence." As for the idea that a snake might pursue and attack a person for no reason, Beane is quick to dismiss it as something these animals simply don't do. "It might be scary to the female snake to have that many males, but it shouldn't be scary to people."Įven during mating season, snakes aren't normally aggressive animals, he adds. "If you see something like that, you're lucky to see it," Beane said. This behaviour may be commonplace for the snakes, but it's not something people come across very often. After some serious snake-ball action, the sexes will go their separate ways, the females will give birth to young later in the summer, and the whole circle of life will play out again next year. Right now, it's about the time of year when these non-venomous northern water snakes – the only such species commonly found near Charlotte – are emerging from their long winter rest. "Females put out pheromones and males track them and find them, and occasionally you'll have a lot of males trying to mate with one female at the same time." "That's pretty common in water snakes," Beane told me. I reached out to Jeffrey Beane, Collections Manager of Herpetology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, to shed some light on what the snakes were actually doing. ![]() #Charlotte #Wildlife /KHTijKJoja- Killingsworth April 19, 2017 My face every time I see the picture of tangled snakes on the Little Sugar Creek Greenway. NOPE /IRN98PUETY- Carolyn McDowell April 18, 2017 ![]() The photo was snapped in Charlotte, North Carolina by Christine Proffitt, who was walking along a nearby creek when she came across the snakes wrapped around each other and basking at the water's edge.īall of snakes on the Charlotte greenway. (It s eems snakes can't even mate in peace without people freaking out.)Ĭharlotte woman finds pile of snakes on Little Sugar Creek Greenway: /6z9HeFXrMY- Spectrum News CLT April 17, 2017 When a photo of several water snakes coiled around each other in a "mating ball" surfaced online, social media and news reports were quick to label the rare display of serpentine togetherness as "scary", "shocking" and "creepy". ![]()
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