Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Does anybody know of a scientific study that show the correlation of snake deaths to damaging affects in the environment. I have to do a speech on why you should not kill snakes and how it hurts the environment. I would love any help that can be provided.
Thanks

I can't think of any off hand, but if you do a search on Rattlesnake round-ups, you might find something about the increase of rodents in an area where the rattlesnakes have been mostly decimated. There may be incidents where rodent diseases are more prevalent do to thie fact that the snake population has been compromised.
Just a thought.
Randal Berry

There are tons of articles out there on the damage caused by rodents, especially to farms and crops, but also to individual homes. And as mentioned in the other post, there are articles that speak to the elevation of rodent populations due to decimation of snake populations. And lets not forget the subsiquent outbreak of disease as natures way of controlling surges in these rodent populations, outbreaks that are often transmittable to humans. I think that may be your best angle for your paper. Another thing to consider, and I'm sure there are papers out there on it, but as the rodent populations increase, so do there other predators, namely coyotes. When the coyotes have an unlimited rodent supply, they get much healthier and in turn their population increases. As they get healthier and more of them seek food, deer become easier prey and hence the deer populations are affected as well. This is just a small narrow view of the wide spread effects on the food web when one vital component is removed.

Hope this helps.

prairie dogs in western Kansas due to the Sharon Springs Kansas rattlesnake hunt. Meaning that with the event of this and the capturing of the specie of prairie rattlers, there has been an increase of the prairie dog in certain areas. I just don't remember where I had read that but being from Kansas I'm sure that i saw this someplace. Maybe some article from KU or the KHS.
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I may be old , cantankerous, crabby, and cynical, but......

Nature has long maintained a delicate balance among its indigenous species and venomous snakes certainly are a very necessary component to many ecosystems through out the world. For many years the western diamondback rattlesnake was able to keep the Texas drunken redneck population in check. Unfortunately after years of glorious natural selection, the drunken Texas redneck’s would organize their efforts and combine their intellect to finally outsmart the western diamondback rattlesnake, leading to “rattler round-ups”. This in turn threw off natures balance and would eventually lead to our current president and the resulting environmental damage. Feel free to use any of this in your oral report.

Now I'm not usually one for internet acronyms, but that was hilarious not to mention significantly accurate.