When a friend spoke of rattlesnake sightings on his Colorado ranch, Scott Boback asked to poke around the property.
Most people might shudder, but Boback, a herpetologist – someone who studies reptiles and amphibians – believes snakes are misunderstood and unfairly judged. He needed just 15 minutes to discover the serpentine source: A den of prairie rattlesnakes, lounging in the warm Rocky Mountain sunshine.
Now, eight years later, that den is open for the public to see, thanks to the RattleCam (rattlecam.org).
Boback, a biology professor at Dickinson College, teamed up with researchers from California Polytechnic State University and a California rattlesnake awareness group to bring the RattleCam to life, aiding research efforts into rattlesnakes. Previously, herpetologists relied on stills from wildlife-monitoring cameras taken every few minutes, leaving the scientists with a daunting amount of photos but without context to go with them.
“There are so many aspects to these organisms that we never really see,” Boback said. “It’s difficult to observe them without our presence affecting the behavior.”
There are two RattleCams. One is focused on a cluster of about 10 pregnant Pacific rattlesnakes – known as a rookery – in California. They sunbathe together in warm areas that provide the best temperatures for gestation.
The second RattleCam, in Colorado, is trained on a larger prairie rattlesnake rookery with somewhere between 20 and 100 pregnant females – and at least several hundred other snakes nearby. The den is so deep and complex that the scientists aren’t entirely sure how many snakes there are in total.
Researchers are not disclosing the exact locations of the dens out of fear of humans disturbing their environment.
The team hopes to better understand how rattlesnakes interact with each other. Boback said the RattleCam could help them see whether, for example, females who have yet to give birth help “babysit” infant offspring of other females in the rookery.
“We’re very interested in learning what goes on throughout pregnancy, but also the birthing period,” he told The Washington Post. “The snakes aggregate at these sites, and hang out all summer long and sort of cook their babies.”
The RattleCam team was inspired by popular live streams that show nesting birds. It was a heavy effort to get enough internet capability in remote areas to reliably stream the live feed, but it will soon pay off as the babies start to arrive in August. Unlike other reptiles, rattlesnake young are born live from their mothers, and don’t hatch from eggs.
“There’s still a lot that we don’t know and understand about the social life of rattlesnakes,” said Tony Daly-Crews, founder of the Rattlesnake Conservancy in Florida. Mother rattlesnakes are known to corral rogue youngsters who try to venture too far from the den too soon after birth, he said, though there’s not much known beyond that when it comes to rattlesnake motherhood.
“This live stream allows us to collect data on wild rattlesnakes without disturbing them, facilitating unbiased scientific discovery,” Emily Taylor, a Cal Poly herpetologist also overseeing the project, said in a news release. “But even more important is that members of the public can watch wild rattlesnakes behaving as they naturally do, helping to combat the biased imagery we see on television shows of rattling, defensive and stressed snakes interacting with people who are provoking them.”
The video cameras are set to follow the seasonal cycle of snakes – they’ll shut off come winter as the snakes enter hibernation and will resume when the snakes wake up in the spring.
Sharp-eyed RattleCam viewers can help researchers by filling out a form with “notable observations” on snake interactions or what they notice when another animal species approaches the den.
Rattlesnakes range in size, from around 1 foot to 5½ feet in length, according to the National Wildlife Federation, and they’re only found in North and South America. There are around 70 types, and while some species are thriving, others aren’t doing so well, Daly-Crews said.
Wildfires have displaced some species in deep corners of New Mexico and Arizona, and others are trending toward extinction, he said, pointing to the Eastern Diamondback, a species currently undergoing review for potential classification as endangered.
People don’t know how much rattlesnakes help their surrounding environments, and humans too, Daly-Crews said. Rattlesnake venom has been used in cancer research and drug development. The reptiles help manage tick populations, are a well-known form of rodent population control, and are reliable seed dispersers throughout their habitats, boosting plant life.
Daly-Crews hopes the RattleCam helps dispel misinformation around snakes, like the belief that a juvenile snake’s venom is more potent than an adult’s. “That’s not based in fact,” he said. Plus, he said, snakes are more scared of humans than humans are of them.
“I guarantee you, most Washington Post readers have probably walked by hundreds, if not thousands, of rattlesnakes [while] out in the wild hiking around in the woods, and never saw or heard them.”
07-18-2024 03:58PM