Meet four Florida snakes (plus one cute bonus snake)

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A couple of weeks ago, we threw a snake party in WFSU-FM Studio A. This was not by design. I thought snakes would be a fantastic way to kick off the video version of Coast to Canopy, and I feel good about how that turned out. As we recorded, though, coworkers throughout the building saw the video feed and spread the word.

When we finished recording – well, it’s a good thing my guests brought snakes used to being handled by school children.

I wondered how people would react to having several snakes unleashed in the building. Would it send out a wave of anxious panic? Not at all, it turns out.

Folks can vary in their ability to appreciate a snake, and that’s a theme I wanted to explore on the show. How do we coexist with snakes? How afraid should we be of venomous snakes? And, for those of us whom would like to see or photograph snakes, where and when should we go?

I also wanted to see and talk about snakes who live in various Florida habitats, and the ecology of these snakes. Our state is home to tree snakes and underground snakes; those that like it high and dry as well as a few that eat nothing but fish (and also a few that eat nothing but eels, or crawfish, or salamanders).

This post is about the diverse snakes of Florida. We covered so much ground in our discussions, that I wrote a whole other post about coexisting with snakes. We’ll have a third story out soon.

Meet our guests

• Kim Sash is the Biological Monitoring Coordinator at Tall Timbers Research Station and Land Conservancy.
• Pierson Hill is Research Associate with the FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.
• My cohost is Regan McCarthy, Interim News Director for WFSU Public Media.

If you’re wondering about the dynamic between Kim and Pierson, they are a married couple. They have appeared on the WFSU Ecology Blog numerous times throughout the years. Too many to list them all, but if you click on their names in the list above to peruse their video appearances.

Web sites/ research mentioned in the podcast

During our conversation, Kim and Pierson mentioned a couple of sites where people could report rare snakes or invasive snake parasites. Kim also mentioned a research paper she co-authored. Here are links to these resources:

• Report rare snakes to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. A couple of the snakes they’re looking for were guests on our podcast: the Florida pine snake and the eastern king snake. They’re also looking for eastern indigo snakes. FWC is also looking at iNaturalist observations of their target species.
• To report sightings of invasive snake lungworms, email slam.conservation@gmail.com or tag slam.conservation on Instagram. SLAM stands for Snake Lungworm Alliance and Monitoring. I’ll have a separate story on lungworms, also known as pentastomes, later this week.
• Research paper by Kim Sash and Dr. Bruce Means about the decline of eastern king snake populations in north Florida.

Coast to Canopy blog posts are curated transcripts. My notes appear in italics.

How many snake species do we have in Florida?

Rob Diaz de Villegas: Every once in a while, I see these biodiversity maps of the north of North America, you know, trees, reptiles. And I see a lot of times that concentrated spot of biodiversity tends to be not just Florida, but really our area, right around here.

How diverse are snakes in Florida?

Pierson Hill: We have 46 species of snakes in Florida. Only six of those are venomous species. And so the vast majority of species in Florida are non-venomous. But you can find them in almost every habitat Florida has to offer. We have snakes that live underground. We have snakes that live in the water, and we have snakes that live in the trees.

Defining a biodiversity hotspot

Kim Sash: And I just want to add, because you’re bringing out biodiversity and because I’m more of a wildlife biologist, I think it’s really important that people do understand that we live in a biodiversity hotspot… the southeast is a biodiversity hotspot.

Kim Sash: And there’s two ways that that is that that is designated. And one is that you have to have over 1500 species of vascular plants. And so those are plants that live there, endemic. They live here and they don’t live anywhere else.

Specifically, the American southeast has over 1500 species of vascular plants. Within that range, the highest concentration of tree species in Liberty County, one county over from Tallahassee.

Kim Sash: And the other one is that you have to have over I think it’s 70% habitat loss.

So you get you get designated as a biodiversity hotspot because you’re you don’t have very much habitat for all of these species that actually occur there. And, you know, the Apalachicola National Forest is one of those areas that really pings that map because of all of the vascular plans, and then a lot of amphibians and a lot of reptiles, including a lot of species of snake.

Pierson Hill: This is an eastern kingsnake, which is one of the more widespread and common races of the larger species called the common kingsnake. So, depending on where you go in North America, you see various color forms of the common kingsnake. In the eastern U.S. we get the eastern kingsnake, which are typically black or kind of chocolate brown with, yellow or white bands.

In Florida you find snakes that look like this, basically in the Florida panhandle and extreme northern Florida, and they change appearance as you go southward through the peninsula, you get something called the Florida kingsnake, which has a much busier, yellow and black pattern. And by the time you get to the Everglades, you get something called the Brooks kingsnake, which is kind of a pale yellow tan with almost no pattern.

Eastern king snakes are what we call a generalist. You can kind of find them in most every habitat that we have. They eat such a wide variety of other animals; they also eat a lot of turtle eggs. So you tend to find them around the edges of lakes where turtles spend a lot of time nesting.

But of course, [eastern kingsnakes] claim to fame is their ability to eat venomous snakes. They’ll eat any snake that they can wolf down, but they have some immunity to the venom of our venomous snake species and can easily eat a cottonmouth or a rattlesnake.

Reporting king snakes and other rare snakes

Pierson Hill: Since they eat a lot of the things that occur near, wetlands, especially turtle eggs and other snakes, [like] water snakes, they tend to be most abundant around, lakes, river ways. And, actually, these days, they’re most abundant around the edges of salt marshes along the coast where they take advantage of abundant rodent populations.

We’re actually witnessing a disappearance in eastern king snakes throughout the southeast, especially in northern Florida.

We are, tracking citizen observations as part of my job. FWC maintains a rare snake reporting website that citizens, if they see an eastern kingsnake in their yard or while they’re out in a park or national forest, they can upload the observation there. It helps us track their populations over time and know where they’re doing well versus where they’re disappearing.

We’re not sure why they’ve disappeared. Like I said, they’re a generalist snake. General snakes tend to be able to tolerate human disturbances to the landscape. So something as robust as an eastern kingsnake disappearing from our landscape is, is alarming, right?

The king snake’s disappearance from Tall Timbers

Kim Sash: I did my master’s on snakes and I did that at Tall Timbers. So I caught over 2600 individual snakes. I put pit tags on them, like you microchip your dog, so I could recognize individuals if I recaptured them. I could keep count.

Bruce Means, I know you’ve talked to, he’s a famous herpetologist. And so Bruce was actually a Research Director at Tall Timbers in the 80s and just opportunistically, Bruce out on the landscape of Tall Timbers, Caught about 28… eastern king snakes.

And so I did this intensive trapping study and just on Tall Timbers alone, I caught over, I think, 1800 snakes. I had several sites, but about 1800 snakes on Tall Timbers, 19 different species and never once did I catch an eastern king snake. And so Bruce and I actually wrote… a paper on this and just… definitely a decline of these species.

And yeah, definitely don’t know why. But some people think maybe fire ants are playing a role… Fire ants, as babies are hatching, will go into the eggs and kill them. They do that to snakes, turtles, ground nesting birds, all of those things. So maybe that that plays a role. But yeah, it’s really weird to not have Eastern Kings snakes out in the landscape.

Rob Diaz de Villegas: That’s not as grey as I thought it would be.

Pierson Hill: People who keep gray rat snakes, you know, we’ll designate these pale ones as white oak phase gray rat snakes. But, know locally here in the Florida Panhandle, people call all gray rat snakes, oak snakes. This is a colloquialism.

Regan McCarthy: Do they tend to live in oak trees? Is there a connection there?

Pierson Hill: They do. They like live oak trees a lot. They are arboreal, which means they spend a lot of time up in tree limbs. It’s because they eat a lot of bird eggs and hatchling birds. They raid nests and, great climbers, they can climb straight up the side of a tree.

The home range of a grey rat snake

Kim Sash: So when I did my master’s, I put, radio trackers on these in gray rattlesnakes and corn snakes. And it’s amazing, these guys, their familiarity with their home range. So we would track them. And, actually, that’s how Pierce and I met.

He was my intern. I don’t recommend dating your employees, but, we dated for 13 years. We dated for 13 years, so we made sure it was real. Yeah, but anyway, they would go to the same oak tree again and again and again… about a seven acre home range.

Crawling around their belly to get back to that same spot time after time. And a lot of times they’ll climb up those oak trees both to forage, eating a baby gray squirrel, or to go up there to shed. They’re so susceptible when they’re shedding, because their eyes, they kind of go blind almost, you know, because their eyes turn.

That’s what we call site fidelity, they’re going back to the same site again and again and again. When you cut down a tree or you remove that tree… there’s a lot of development happening in Tallahassee right now. And you see like all these trees being cut down. So, that’s probably really disrupting some of these snake’s home ranges.

Grey rat snakes in longleaf habitats

Kim Sash: What’s interesting is that my friend Jen House, who works at the Jones Center up at Ichauway, she also had radio telemetry… little radios, you that make a beep.

So we follow them. And the Jones Center is much more of the the pristine, like, longleaf wiregrass ecosystem, whereas Tall Timbers is much more old field. So we have a lot more hardwoods. And what we saw was that, her guys, because she had less oak trees, they have a much larger home range because they’re traveling a lot further to get to some of those hardwood trees, than they would be at Tall Timbers, right?

An old field refers to an abandoned agricultural field. The fields were often cleared pine flatwoods, but once they were abandoned, different trees would move in. Many of these trees moved in from low lying, wet areas, trees such as magnolias and live oaks. These are common trees we see in Tallahassee today, regardless of whether they are found higher or lower on a hill. When Seminoles arrived in this area in the 1800s, it had been largely abandoned for almost a century. They named it Tallahassee, which, in the Muscogee tongue, means old field.

How rat snakes climb

Regan McCarthy: I’m drawn to its underbelly area, and I think I’m seeing this shape of the scale on this snake’s underbelly compared to the one we were just looking at. It looks like a completely different shape to me. And I’m wondering… these ones are much flatter and maybe more like long and rectangular compared to the other ones that maybe were more diamond shaped on the kingsnake that we were just looking at.

And I’m wondering, does that have to do with, where the snake lives? The fact that it climbs is that, is that what I’m noticing here?

Pierson Hill: That is very perceptive. So, the large scales on the underside of snakes we call ventral scales, and in rat snakes they are especially hard edged. And those form kind of little hooks that they use to climb straight up the sides of trees. If you watch them climb vertically up a tree trunk, you can see each little belly scale hooking in to every little irregularity in the surface that they’re climbing on.

People often find them climbing up the sides, their houses on if there’s brick or stucco. I mean, that’s how fine of a surface that they can actually cling to despite having no legs or claws.

One of the great backyard snakes

Pierson Hill: Grey rat snakes are one of the best backyard snakes. And, they’re one of the most familiar. They are able to tolerate suburbia. And, so, when they are living and coexisting in our yards, they’re eating squirrels. They’re raiding birds nests. The young ones eat lizards and frogs.

Also, they do a great service of, pest control. A lot of people have problems with rodents invading their sheds and chewing on wires and that kind of thing. So if you let rat snakes coexist, they’ll help you out with your rodent problem.

Kim Sash: We have a chicken coop, and a lot of people find gray ratsnakes eating eggs in their chicken coop. And what do you call our chicken coop?

Pierson Hill: The rat snake feeder.

Kim Sash: So, if you can give up an egg, for instance, for pest control… but, yeah, it’s super harmless. I mean, these these things are very docile, not usually very aggressive. Usually you could just pick them up and move them.

Pierson Hill: This pine snake is a Florida pine snake, and… we have a permit for this one. I think [it’s] state threatened. He was actually hit on the road… we were out road cruising for snakes, and we came across this guy, and he was maybe three feet long.

Kim Sash: He was run over. His head was run over. So you can see one of his eye sockets is blown. And he was crawling upside down. We thought maybe he would die, but, gosh, they’re resilient. He pulled through, and so now I’ve used him as an outreach snake ever since. He was really weird for a while.

But he’s a good representative for this species. And because these pine snakes are so rare, it’s fun to have him as an outreach animal.

An underground (fossorial) snake

Pierson Hill: Pine snakes, they have this, cool, modified scale on the tip of their nose that they use for digging. They’re really good at digging in sandy soils. They spend 80, 90% of their time underground in rodent burrows.

So, if you’re ever in the sandy parts of Florida, and you look out in a cattle pasture and you see these white mounds of sand popping up everywhere, you may think they’re ant mounds or something like that, they’re oftentimes a push up mound of something called the pocket gopher, which is a burrowing rodent. Almost like a mole, but more related to a rat.

Pine snakes are specialists on eating pocket gophers underground, and they can actually catch and swallow a pocket gopher in an underground tunnel not much bigger than their bodies.

So they’re incredibly strong. They’ll grab the pocket gopher, and they’ll just press their body up against the wall and smash the pocket gopher in between the snake’s body and the wall of the burrow, and not even be able to constrict.

Kim Sash: When snake trapping, really the only time I really see these is in April, and that’s during breeding season. So they’re out on the surface looking for mates, but otherwise [they’re hunting for] pocket gophers. They can have 150 foot tunnels underground. So, it’s down in those tunnels moving around.

Pine snakes and development

Kim Sash: One of the things that we talk about a lot with conservation is soil compaction as well. And so… obviously with everything that’s fossorial, soil compaction really impacts them because it makes it a lot harder to dig holes or to get around in rodent burrows. So, those areas that constantly have traffic or your yard or places that are constantly driven over, that’s where the lot of these species are disappearing from.

Pierson Hill: And another reason these are state-threatened in Florida is because they prefer the higher, drier, sandier areas where people like to build their houses. And so, much of their habitat has been developed or is being developed. They also need open grassy habitats which are maintained by fire. And so prescribed fire is increasingly difficult to implement as our landscapes become more and more divided.

There are a number of threats for the species, but they seem to do well as long as you keep things open and grassy and well burned.

Western hognose snakes are not native to Florida. Kim keeps this as an educational snake because it eats mice, while the native species eat toads. This makes them more difficult to keep in captivity.

Kim Sash: We have two native hognose snakes in Florida. We have the southern hognose snake and the eastern hognose snake. And this guy looks a little bit more like the southern hognose snake with the blotches, but he’s actually a western hognose snake. And I bought him, he is captively bred.

They’re just easier to keep in captivity… but otherwise very similar looking to to the species we have here in Florida.

Pierson Hill: And this is another snake that needs high, dry, sandy habitats, like just like the, southern pine snake. So you find them in the same places at the same times, quite frequently. Our native hognose snakes get a little bit bigger than this, but this is about a full grown male. The females get about twice as big.

Our native hognose snakes are fossorial toad-eaters

Kim Sash: I don’t know if you can see on the camera, but he’s just got the cutest little upturned nose right there. These guys are actually big toad eaters. And… if you’ve ever seen a toad, it’ll kind of dig down into the dirt and kind of hang out.

And so, [hognoses] use their little shovel like nose to get those toads out. What’s interesting about these guys is they’re actually rear-fanged venomous. Normally, you think about a venomous snake, and they have the fangs in the front. These guys actually have a fang that goes to the back, and they can use that to actually… if you catch a toad, a lot of times they’ll blow up with air and make themselves really big.

So, that fang can kind of pop those toads and make it a little bit easier to swallow. There’s mild venom.

Hog noses rarely bite. This is a species that a lot of people like to have as pets because very docile, not willing to bite.

But if they did get you with that rear fang, it could be like a bee sting. Another rear-fanged venomous that we have is actually the garter snake.

The (kind of gross) way hognose snakes defend themselves

Regan McCarthy: This body is kind of sand colored. We’re thinking because he’s going to blend in pretty well with the sand? Predators won’t see them, but if they do see him then…

Kim Sash: [It] plays dead and poops all over himself and will stick out his tongue and put on a huge display. These guys are big, kind of fat bodied slow movers, and so they don’t try to get away from you. They just try to be dead. And so yeah, they poop all over themselves… if you roll themselves [over] to make themselves seem dead.

And they’ll open their mouth and stick their tongue out there. Very dramatic.

These guys, when they’re in captivity, they lose that rolling over and playing dead thing.

But it is a really cool characteristic of a wild hognose that they do that and, they’re also a hisser, so they’ll flatten their head out, kind of try to do this puff adder thing.

Pierson Hill: Almost like a cobra.

Pierson Hill: This is the striped Gulf salt marsh snake. It is the only one of the six species of water snakes we have in Florida, the only one that has stripes. And, that is an adaptation to the habitat that they’re found in. You can only find these snakes in coastal tidal marshes, especially where you see the open grassy areas like needle rush and Spartina grasses.

They hide in those grassy areas during the day, blending in and hoping to avoid being eaten by herons and other birds. Then they come out at night, especially during low tide. They eat fish in these tidal pools and little tidal rivulets where the fish concentrate, so strict fish eaters. Unless you’re out in those habitats at low tide, you almost never see the snake, despite them being incredibly common.

Where to see a salt marsh snake

Rob Diaz de Villegas: At low tide at night or just low tide in general?

Pierson Hill: During the cooler weather, you can find them during the day more, but they are very apprehensive of being in the open where they can be seen by a heron. But occasionally, one will make a bad decision.

Kim Sash: They’re a good one to go out with a headlamp at dark, during low tide. You target those tidal pools where the fish are trapped. Oftentimes, you’ll see these guys and they are hilarious eaters. Pierson keeps these snakes and, like he said, they all eat fish. They’ll carry around a fish in their mouth and they, they kind of have their head elevated.

You’ve never seen a snake look so proud to have caught a fish. They’ll carry it around, and then the other ones will try to steal it from them. They’re just ridiculous.

Pierson Hill: A lot of personality.

The only saltwater adapted snake in the United States

Pierson Hill: This is also the United States’ only saltwater adapted snake, which is extremely unusual. We don’t have true sea snakes like they do in Asia and Australia. So this is the best we can do.

They don’t have any special glands or any sort of physiological ability to tolerate salt. They just kind of avoid it behaviorally, as far as we know, they just know not to drink it. Whereas if you put a freshwater adapted water snake in the same habitats, they would drink the salt water and die pretty quick. And so they’re able to recognize salt versus fresh water.

After heavy rain, they’ll drink this lens of fresh water off the surface of the salt marsh.

Salt marsh snakes losing their stripes

Kim Sash: These guys are really interesting because they will hybridize with our banded water snakes. And that’s one of the things Pierson studies. And I think it’s pretty interesting.

Pierson Hill: We think of species as being very discrete things. The type A, type B, and they don’t blend together. But in the case of the salt marsh snake and the banded water snake, they segregate strongly by habitat, look very different, do different things, but in circumstances where they come together, they’ll actually breed and create hybrids.

Banded water snakes have obviously encircling bands, where these guys have stripes. When you merge the two, you get these bizarre looking hybrid snakes, a combination of stripes and blotches. If you’re at Saint Marks National Wildlife Refuge down by the lighthouse, around those impoundments, you can find hybrids. Hickory Mound Wildlife Management Area also has a hybrid population.

Kim Sash: Kind of a function of those freshwater impoundments now being so close to the salt water. That’s kind of a manmade structure that made these species that might not have really ever come together as much kind of come together.

Pierson Hill: There’s a race of saltmarsh snake on the Atlantic coast that’s almost been hybridized out of existence because of people modifying the coastline with impoundments and mosquito control canals. It’s hard to find pure populations of them anymore.

Kim Sash: Finding a very pure Gulf salt marsh snake… is getting to be more rare as well, as these these hybridizations continue to occur, which is kind of sad because I think really what they end up doing is functioning more like a.. banded water snake than they do as a Gulf salt marsh snake.

It’s almost like you could lose that species.