Reptile & Amphibian Forums

are racers inteligent? generaly speaking compared to other snakes or other colubrids at least? they seem to be more alert and know whats goin on than any of the other snakes i see. for instance, ill catch a water snake and it just keeps snapping aimlessly, but a racers follows ur hands and stuff and strikes with more aim it seems. discuss..

Coachwhips are the smatest snakes I work with, They seem to be low level problem solvers.
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"Life without risk is to merely exist."

I have a young Mexican racer and it is becoming one of my favorite snakes because it so interesting to watch. I have several rat snakes of a few different species and while some are more alert than others, none come close to the level of alertness in this racer! It does not like being handled and first gapes at me right toward my face and then bites whatever it can reach and holds on. I mostly keep the walls of it's cage blocked so as not to stress it, but when I look in at it, it is immediately aware that I am looking at it and cocks it's head at me and gets ready for action. I don't know if it is more intelligent or just more alert, but definately different from other snakes. -TB

They certainly seem to be fairly intelligent, but whether that is just because they rely on vision to a greater degree than most other snakes. They certainly watch hands and to a lesser extent faces very intently, though not as much as King cobras, my friend has two of these and they will look straight into your eyes almost all the time.
Whether this is intelligence I don't know, but once while feeding smokey (western whip) by hand he knocked the rat out of my hands, then looked as my hand, i removed the hand from the viv and he followed it until I put it flat against my chest. He then stopped looked straight up into my eyes and slowly reversed back into his viv. I wouldn't have considered this a fear response as he's extremely calm, more that he realized that the hand was part of me and so didn't bite. It must b said he followed my hand fairly slowly (for a whip) as opposed to a proper feed strike.

Bill... Do you have any stories or observations to hold out the problem solving statement? I'd be very interested in hearing any about my favourite snakes.

Mike

P.S. Here's my new western ? Though to be fair I really need to find out how to tell the subspecies apart. AS I have one that looks like a western but has gold eyes, where all the others have orange. Yay I'm now up to 5 coachwhips.

I have many stories but this one is cool. My 1998 hatched female was making eye contact with me. Her head was up like a Cobra and she followed my movements as I passed by her enclosure. The second day she did this I opened the cage door and offered her a mouse but no go, she wanted something else. The third day in a row she did the same behavior so again I opened her door and looked her in the eye and shouted at her, WHAT? Then it hit me she must be gravid. She looked too skinny but she is telling me something and I’ll bet she wants me to put her in a nest box. She had laid eggs every previous year and I always manually put her into a nesting box. I pulled her out and sure enough she had an egg at her vent! Within a few hours after placing her into her nest I had eggs. They all hatched.

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"Life without risk is to merely exist."

I do not put nest boxes in my snake cages. I usualy place them into an individual rubbermaid a week after the snake does a pre egg laying shed.
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"Life without risk is to merely exist."

Watch one hunt and you'll see they do seem to be able to think about what's going on more so than, say, a ratsnake.....
:Mark
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Surrender Dorothy!

www.crimsonking.funtigo.com