Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm new to the forum and just wanted to share my thanks to the breeders of indigos for providing an opportunity for others to learn more about them and even experience them first hand if inclined to purchase and care for them.

I wouldn't have imagined a few years ago that more than a few if any people had indigos in captivity and I am relieved to know that there are indeed quite a lot of you who are busy year round with these wonderful snakes.

I am curious though, and maybe Dean A. or somebody with similar resource and research background would be kind enough to comment, what is their (Eastern Indigo) endangered status like today compared to ten years ago? Or even 25 or more years ago when they first became officially endangered?

That is a very difficult question to answer.
I would say as a general rule, most of the populations continue to decline as a result of habitat destruction.

Where suitable habitat exisits, there are still many strong breeding populations. But large areas of unfragmented habitat are harder and harder to come by...and the outlook there for future in that regard is grim.

Since it is still very difficult to survey for these snakes (to find out how many a given area has...if any), it's a long and expensive process to really examine if the indigo populations that exisit are growing, shrinking, or staying status quo.

Bottom line...looks like where large tract of suitable habitat continue to exist...they will hold on. The rest of the populations seem to have numbered days.

Eastern Indigos are not listed as Endangered. They were officially listed on Appendix II of the Endangered Species List as Threatened on January 31, 1979, and inexplicably have never been upgraded to Endangered.
-----
We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Im'not sure, but I THINK they are listed as ENDANGERED by the individual states in their natural range; Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, maybe South Carolina. The guy from South Carolina has told me that they are trying to remove the Eastern Indigo from the list of native species, since no one can remember having ever seen one there. The Feds haven't upped the anty so to speek, because The individual States already did. I think.
T.