As I said almost a week ago, there was no question that this one was going to make the Estate Find this week – unless something really kickass popped up later on. But as I was taking care of a few yard details on Sunday, ol’ Eagle Eyes here spotted something stretched across the grass:
I’m being facetious of course, because this was really hard to miss. I consider this way too early to be seeing snakes, and we really just got past another cold snap, though it didn’t drop below freezing. This is an eastern rat snake (Pantherophis quadrivittatus,) almost identical to one found four years ago except for being half the size. This one was quite complacent when I went over and picked it up, but then realized that this probably wasn’t ideal and began struggling gently, mostly trying to move out of my grasp. At no time did it make anything resembling an aggressive move, which is fairly typical for the species, and because it probably just came out of its winter torpor, it didn’t even defecate on me. I never tried to get a measurement (running a piece of string along the length of a coiling snake trying to get away is never easy,) but I’m estimating it as a meter in length.
Now the faintly amusing bit. I had submitted one of the images from that linked post above to the annual photo contest at Panda’s Thumb last year, not because of its striking artistic merit, but because they request images of scientific interest, and I felt that the color pattern might be something special. It used to be that there were black rat snakes and yellow rat snakes, and while this one certainly wasn’t black, it could hardly be called yellow, nor did it appear even remotely like the yellow rat snake that I’d photographed a year previously. One source that I’d found had said that it seemed the yellow and black subspecies of rat snakes could interbreed, and I was wondering if I had an example of that.
I mention Panda’s Thumb because, the day after I caught this one (so, Monday,) Panda’s Thumb featured my image – not because I’d won, but because webmaster Matt Young often features all of the entries to the contest on subsequent weeks. However, Matt had found a much better publication that I ever had, which updated things quite significantly – and yet, still a little hazily. The scientific names have gone through multiple changes even as I’ve been featuring the species on the blog, and they’re not exactly pinned down yet, but it seems that both the yellow rat snakes and the black rat snakes may be the same species, differing in coloration depending on location. Where I used to live in central North Carolina, the blacks were predominant, but out on the coastal plains where I am now, the coloration pictured here is common, while towards the mountains it becomes more of a blotchy brown color. None of these match what I’d found in the coastal plains of Georgia, and it’s hard to say which of these morphs extends where, when we’re talking that much farther south. Genetically, however, they are virtually identical, and so the actual species remains up for further debate. This is either a Pantherophis quadrivittatus or a Pantherophis obsoletus quadrivittatus, and unfortunately, I had released the snake before I had a chance to ask it what it preferred.
Once again, this highlights something that gets missed a little too often, which is that species distinctions are purely a human creation and conceit; the animals themselves know who to breed with, but when we try to pin such things down, there are often large grey areas. Genetic sequencing can help to a degree, but recognize that every individual is genetically different from every other, including its parents, plus there are always a hell of a lot of gene pairs in the first place, so even just directly comparing two individuals can take months of sequencing. In some cases there are large portions with significant diversity, usually due to the length of time that any species diverged from another, so telling human DNA from chimp isn’t too hard. But then, telling any domestic dog species apart from a wolf, genetically, is next to impossible. And we can visually tell lions and tigers apart easily, plus they’re geographically isolated – but they can interbreed, which fudges one of the definitions of ‘species.’ It’s tricky, and no surprise that the rat snakes will continue to be debated for a while yet.
Now, obviously my specimen here wasn’t blending in with anything and was remarkably easy to spot, but see that colorful thing behind my shoulder in the pic above? Yeah, that’s one of the favored perches of the red-shouldered hawk that was hunting in the yard; this was a damn dangerous place for the snake to be. We haven’t seen Red in the yard for a few weeks, and it looks like the pair might have abandoned the nest that was here too, though they have remained in the vicinity because we hear and see them several times a week. This snake’s days might be numbered. But that day, after I released it back where I found it, it disappeared under a bush, only to re-emerge perhaps two hours later and set off determinedly across the lawn, while we followed it out of curiosity until it went off into the neighbor’s yard. We’ll see if it appears again.
