Date is approximate. Found hit on the roadside in a neighborhood with no plausible habitat in sight.
Found in building entryway. Appeared to be a hatchling 7-8 inches long. It was relocated to a pine thicket behind the building.
This photo was not staged and the animals are wild. They were untouched and shortly after the photos, the turtle slid into the pond with the alligator.
This photo was not staged and the animals are wild. They were untouched and shortly after the photos, the turtle slid into the pond with the alligator.
An unfortunate accident caused the death of a cottonmouth. Inside the snake, there was a northern water snake. Inside the water snake, there was a sculpin. Food chain in action!
Epic battle that ended the corn snake's life.
Coral snake biting a rattle snake
IDing the longer snake
featured on LKCNHM Eyes of Naturalist Competition
https://lkcnhm.nus.edu.sg/presenting-lkcnhms-eyes-of-a-naturalist-contest-winners/
A 2.4m long Green Mamba caught this Village Weaver then dropped the prey onto the ground below. Within 30 seconds it went down onto the ground and positioned itself to ingest the bird and once the bird was partially swallowed it pulled itself back into the undergrowth and later was seen in the tree with a lump in its body. There is a resident pair of these snakes in my garden that I see regularly. I have posted this same snake earlier this year with a Grey-headed Sparrow. Has a yellow scale above its right eye. It hunts over my bird table in the garden.
Eating a southern pacific rattlesnake. 9 photos. FYI: we did come back the same direction 30 minutes later and saw the same snake (full belly) on a patch of asphalt about 10 yards from where we first saw it, as if giving itself belly heat (air temps were still around 80 degrees). Due to some comments received about regurge, I also went back in the daylight the next day, and checked the area and did not find a regurged rattler. I believe the king kept it down.
Ringneck snake from Santa Barbara County, California.
As my 1000th observation submitted to iNaturalist, here is something a little different and unusual from my archives.
My colleagues and I took this photograph of an actual original and unique X-Ray (physical "hard copy") film made in the Emergency Room of the University hospital in which I worked night shifts back in 2002. It was the regional center for medical treatment of snake bites in north central Florida.
This snake had bitten someone late at night, roughly in the vicinity of Cross Creek, southeast of Gainesville, as I remember, and the snake was killed and brought to the E.R. as proof of the species of poisonous snake that had inflicted the bite, for antivenom administration purposes. There were a couple different types of antivenom then, and they usually took a little time to reconstitute or prepare. All pit vipers in Florida inject similar venom when they bite, but it is different from that of the Coral Snake for instance, which is North America's only native Cobra. Having the actual body of the snake delivered to the E.R. is not absolutely necessary of course, but it does insure correct identification as to species, for whatever that may be worth, at the time, and in later analysis.
While identifying a snake from an X-Ray photograph may be a little unusual, it is not so difficult in this case as some might imagine. After all, here is a very large Pit Viper, totally without tail rattles, in Alachua County Florida.
Just how big was it? Coiled up as you see, it almost doesn't fit on a piece of film that was 11 by 14 inches in size. The snake's head, distorted a bit by the trauma of its demise, alone is nearly 3 inches long, measured directly on the film itself. The snake's coiled body, head to tail, can be measured on the original film by laying a piece of string on the image, tracing the course of the backbone. At 58 inches, or 4 feet 10 inches (147 centimeters) then, this a pretty large snake as Water Moccasins go.
What's more, one of the reasons we X-rayed it at all was that it had clearly recently eaten something. It had a large bulge in it's stomach, down about a third of it's body length, just past its air-filled lungs that are visible on the film as well defined darker shapes. We found the bulge was a big fish with a large blunt bony head, very visible swim bladder, which we took to be a catfish, though we lacked an Ichthyologist amongst the E.R. staff of course. I can follow the fish's spine for quite a ways in the image, but lose it somewhere along the snake's lung in the extreme right of the picture. We did not, in any case dissect the snake in the E.R. Nor did we weigh it, unfortunately. For all I know, the patient, who survived with the help of our treatment, took the dead snake and its last meal home with him when he was discharged.
The Technician that made the actual exposure for us on film, at my request, wrote the details of the exposure for future reference on the film itself, which, though the film suffered damage when it was stolen from my vehicle inside a locked briefcase and dumped out in a back alley and further mistreated both by the thieves and the weather, I can still read most of what he wrote with a "magic marker":
"40(or 46) MA
1 MAS
56 KV"
Are there any X-Ray Tech's out there who can confirm that that is in fact a good exposure for a big dead snake?
ID: Pantherophis quadrivittatus
Feeding on a Knight Anole (Anolis equestris)
Eating another snake
Eating a Chinese red-headed centipede
Rough Greensnake catching an orbweaver spider. It got close to the web and then stayed there for what felt like 10 minutes (not sure it was waiting to figure out how to catch the spider or because I had disturbed it). After a while, it finally caught the spider and seemed to have no trouble eating it. My first time seeing a wild snake catch its prey!
Our Nextdoor neighbors found this duo in their back yard - looks like the racer was paralyzed by the Pygmy chomped into its jaw! We took them to a pine rock land and they remained attached.
SB00374
Male
Feeding on a lizard possibly?
Saw this small snake caught in a spiderweb any ideas?
Shed found in ecotone between oak hammock and sandhill
DOR
SB00022
Sp
Platters
Platter 3
Gopher tortoise with burn injuries after a fire.
With Don Fraser; a visit to check on the status of the Sparkleberries -- they are in prime condition now. The weather at the start was sunny and 52 degrees ("feels like" 52) with calm winds. At noon, it was sunny and 72 degrees ("feels like" 72), with a light breeze; it seemed warmer than that. Because this was a visit for hairstreaks, we had 2+ hours to spend before we could reasonably expect the butterflies to come out (it really was around 1100). As a result, we walked all the trails, including "the back 40" and the road to the barn. We finished the visit with nearly an hour at the main Sparkleberry patch, where we saw 4 Great Purple Hairstreaks and one Mangrove Skipper -- we saw one White M Hairstreak and another Mangrove Skipper on "Hairstreak Hill." The Mangrove Skippers were at least one mile east of the nearest mangroves; these are the third and fourth records for the Preserve. We left at 1308.
A really cool observation, a scarlet king eating an egg! Does anyone know who this egg might belong to? It was hard, unlike snake eggs.
Desmognathus pascagoula, Pyron et al., 2022. Muddy floodplain habitat, Pascagoula River drainage.
Not sure at all for this one, but possible. The area is somewhat like a pine forest.
Aberrant, high yellow/low red
Picked up from a couple who had killed it
1st aberrant animal I've seen in person. What a shame
Great Egret, with food (a Scarletsnake)
Based on the plain belly. A bad day for this poor guy.
It was a very snakey day. 3rd one I've seen here and all in different spots.
Being eaten by Tennessee toe bitters
1 of 6 dead tortoises seen within ~2 miles
NUMBER: 20210717
SPECIES: Nine-banded armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus Linnaeus, 1758[1]
DATE, TIME: 17 July 2021, 10:50 am
LOCALITY: ~100 m west of middle western shore of Baker Lake
LATITUDE, LONGITUDE: 26.10804, -81.96701
DISTRIBUTION: Native in Brazil but spread to Mexico when the central American bridge was established and later spread to SE USA, east central states, and now further north and south according to iNaturalist. Probably due to Global Warming since animal is very sensitive to cold. It is the most widespread species of armadillo. We report it in Tobago and Trinidad in the country of Trinidad and Tobago; and the USA states of Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio; and northern Kansas; most of Illinois, Kentucky, and North Carolina (Table 1).
Table 1.
Country/State Location Latitude, Longitude iNaturalist Date
US/Illinois Urbana[2,3] 40.09312, -88.219003 177468026 09 Aug 2023
US/Iowa[4] Clive 41.6147, -93.823334 15782502 22 Aug 2018
US/Kansas Horton[3] 39.66716, -95.516975 91191766 14 Aug 2021
US/Kentucky Pit County[3] 35.775475, -77.249768 143991732 Apr 2022
“ Blue Ridge Parkway[2,3] 35.907807, -82.042644 70064532 Feb 2021
US/Michigan[4] Brown City 43.229824, -82.86464 14393203 15 Jul 2018
US/North Carolina Pitt County[3] 35.775475, -77.249768 143991732 Apr 2022
“ Rockingham County[3] 36.248181, -79.796196 198294188 Feb 2024
“ Union County[2,3] 34.977575, -80.498384 119398020 May 2022
US/Ohio[4] Mansfield 40.779405, -82.513812 97738744 11 May 2021
T & T[5]/ Trinidad[4] Aripo Savannas 10.610661, -61.186144 870371 27 Apr 2014
“/” Asa Wright 10.71789, -61.296293 9741268 16 Sep 2014
“/” Princes Township 10.108932, -61.193296 64955160 15 Nov 2020
“/” Sangre Grande 10.473556, -61.182298 108397702 09 Mar 2022
“/Tobago[4] - - - 11.28576, -60.607903 141746544 10 Nov 2022
“/” Mason Hall 11.201675, -60.705115 149136894 27 Jul 2016
1/5 11 10 years
[2]Representative of several adjacent records; [3]part of state record; [4]State Record; [5]Country Record Trinidad and Tobago
DANGER: The Nine-banded Armadillo can be naturally infected with Mycobacterium leprae and have been implicated in the zoonotic (animal to human) transmission of leprosy in the US states of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida (Sharma et al., 2015; Truman et al., 2011). This also occurs in Mexico but has been less studied (Vera-Cabrera et al., 2022). Can jump 91-120 cm (3-4 ft) straight up, making it particularly dangerous on roads.
USE: Edible (taste like pork), huntable, but not very popular in USA. Leprosy research. Possible alternative food during Global Change.
OBSERVERS: Dr. Ernest H. Williams, Jr.[6,7,9,10] and Dr. Lucy Bunkley-Williams[6,8,9,11]
REFERENCES:
<>Sharma, R., P. Singh, W. J. Loughry, J. M. Lockhart, W. B. Inman, et al. 2015. Zoonotic leprosy in the southeastern United States. Emerging Infective Diseases 21: 2127–2134. 10.3201/eid2112.150501 [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
<>Truman, R. W., P. Singh, R. Sharma, P. Busso , J. Rougemont J, et al. 2011. Probable zoonotic leprosy in the southern United States. New England Journal of Medicine 364:1626–33. 10.1056/NEJMoa1010536 [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
<>Vera-Cabrera, L., C. J. Ramos-Cavazos, N. A. Youssef, C. M. Pearce, C. A. Molina-Torres et al. 2022. Mycobacterium leprae infection in a wild Nine-banded Armadillo, Nuevo León, Mexico. Emerging Infective Diseases 28:747-749. doi: 10.3201/eid2803.211295.PMID: 35202538 Free PMC article.
<>Williams, E. H. and L. Bunkley-Williams. 2021. Further north (USA) and south (South America) Global Warming spreading of the Nine-banded armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus Linnaeus. iNaturalist #93168763, 31 August 2021 (open access) [600].
FOOTNOTES:
[1]Identification was peer-reviewed, text edited and sometimes condensed. The original text is in our reprint #937 and ResearchGate. [6]Extraordinary Professors, Potchefstroom Campus, North-West University, South Africa; Adjunct Professors, Research Field Station, Florida Gulf Coast University, 5164 Bonita Beach Road, Bonita Springs, FL 34134; [7]Dept. Marine Sciences, University of Puerto Rico (retired); [8]Dept. Biology, UPR (retired); [9]920 St. Andrews Blvd, Naples, FL 34113-8943; [10]e-mail ermest.williams1@upr.edu; ORCID 0000-0003-0913-3013; [11]e-mail lucy.williams1@upr.edu, ORCID 0000-0003-1390-911x
Figure 1. Burrow deeply emersed in dense brush and trees.
This record gleaned from field journals I kept between 1968 and 2002. The first 6500+ records I posted on iNat had photo documentation, but now I am posting these records which do not have photos just to provide the data point for the species and location as best as I can for the historical record. I will also add a number to represent the approximate number of individuals of this species I recorded on the given day if more than one.
In my old journals this location is only recorded as "near Westlake, Bleckley County, Georgia". In the late 60s there was an area of abandoned buildings in a rural setting where we regularly hunted snakes. There were several nearby creeks, brushy fields, lots of scattered tin roofing on the ground, etc. I'm sure the area is populated with humanity now. The location is shown as close as I can get to the original location.
32.421 -83.4531
Reptile
About 2-3 inches longer than a size 13 Croc. Likely the size of a size 15 croc if such a croc existed
lifer! stoked!
"Diamondless" aberrant individual, seen moving through property, and vanished into an armadillo burrow.
Digital scan from my color slide. Ordway Preserve (= Ordway-Swisher Biological Station), near Smith Lake, Putnam Co., Florida. 9 Mar 1985.
Amelanistic specimen. Reported in: Stuart, J.N. and C.K. Dodd, Jr. 1985. Life History Notes: Cemophora coccinea copei. Coloration. Herpetological Review 16:78.
A large (10ft+) Burmese python being attacked by an alligator.
Pisgah National Forest
Montane Longleaf Pine forest.
Took my dog out to see this!!! Came back out and he'd just finished it off. I have never heard of a brown anole eating a gecko!! So glad he let me get great shots. (yes, this is real!!!)
This was not my hand.
A typical Payne's Prairie eastern king snake. They were common 50 years ago, when the prairie had huge numbers of water loving snakes. Over a thousand snakes (mostly banded water snakes and Florida green water snakes) were often run over and killed on a given night in the summertime on the two major highways that cross the basin, and eventually the snake populations crashed. Now, there are far fewer water snakes and perhaps no king snakes at all.
The story as I remember it on this one. Someone sent me a text saying they found this snake and had it in a bucket but wanted me to ID it. They "tossed a lizard in with it". I got there later and looked in the bucket under something they had and it was eating the ground skink. Kind of freaked me out when I saw it for two reasons, they had a protected species in a bucket which is a no no and the fact that it was eating a skink. Any website you go to at this point only listed crowned snakes as their food source. Since this pic you see more than just snakes listed. I caught a lot of hell for this pic I took and encouraged the home owner to release it back where he found it after it finished eating