>>No doubt natural selection is at work, but certainly millions of years of skunks, racoons, fox, and other critters attempting to extract and eat them far exceeds the selection from the past 30 years by humans across a fraction of their total range. "Relentlessly" is an exaggeration when you examine the total acreage that they inhabit and it accessibility. >>

Certainly predators do take their share of L. zonata, I would be the first to agree with that, since I have never bought into the myth that the tricolor pattern is aposematic or the result of coral snake mimicry.

However, most predators are opportunistic, and they would not zero in on L. zonata as prey, unlike human collectors. In fact, I would argue that most predators would even fail to see L. zonata when it is out in the open, owing to the cryptic, disruptive coloration of L. zonata while it is on the woodland floor. Predators eat what they can find, and they would definitely not wait outside of the L. zonata rock crevices for hours or even tens of minutes in order to eat one. OTOH, human collectors who have figured out where to find L. zonata are much more determined and persistent, not to mention more effective. It is true that much of L. zonata's range is inaccessible, but where it is accessible, human collectors can be an important factor in shaping L. zonata behavior, and L. zonata is not the only species that has altered its behavior because of humans. Therefore the habit of the older, more "wily" snakes to retreat into the deepest, most inaccessible crevices can only be the result of natural selection brought on by human collectors, but not the result of predation.

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