Well everyone..It's over but will never be forgotten.
I wish to thank the organizers and Loma Linda University for just an awesome few days of science. I have been to many scientific conferences but never one better than this one.
Todays main topics was mostly ecology and conservation of Rattlesnakes. The following were tidbits regarding one of my favorite R/S C. horridus.
You may not want to keep your attention on the ground, since many investigator have found them 3 meters (~9 feet)up in trees. One inverstigator looking at the ground, turned around and found himself FACE to FACE (4 inches from)with a Timber!!!! He did not get tagged, very lucky guy. I know a NY State Trooper that collected Timbers. One day while out in the field he was tagged in the ELBOW by a Timber he never saw till it got him.
If you have a brood of newborn timbers keep them all together till feeding. I know, not what I would normally do but this investigator kept them all in seperate cages but could not get them to feed. When he put them all back into the origional cage and dropped in a mouse it turned into a "shark feeding frenzy". The mouse was hit multipule times from 8 different snakes. He had to quickly kill and introduce many mice to make them all happy.
Timbers have an average of 8 babies every other year if conditions are good.
Timbers seem to mate much later in the summer than I thought. They don't mate after just emerging from hibernation, they just disperse to their summer ranges. The male track down the females to mate in July/August. It subsequently has a very short gestational period since they drop their young in Sept/Oct.
That'all on the Timber I will share for now.
In one population of C. v. viridus had summer range for some snakes up to 22 KM (~13 miles) out and 22 KM back to the den site. Most R/S summer range is just a few miles.
Many conservation measures are going on to save Rattlesnakes from extinction but not many investigator think it will be completely successful, too little-too late. Captive breeding and releasing the neonates at a den site just does not work. Very few neonates survive the first year. Many populations are isolated by roads/development, thus have no fresh DNA to keep the gene pool from stagnation and eventual extinction.
Habitat distruction is really taking it's toll. In CT one developer built a house right smack-dab on an active Timber Den site. Now for most of us that's sort of cool but 99% of home owners would not and you know exactly what would happen. Sometimes,as it was mentioned at the conference, People with crow-bars would attach a den as the snakes emerge and pull it apart, killing every snake they found.
What can we do to help these snakes survive in the wild? Well I'll say it; but it won't be popular:
DON'T COLLECT WILD SNAKES!! There are enough captive bred snakes available for collectors to keep.
Cheers!
Al
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Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
. I was saying to myself that's not right but that's what I heard.
