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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Snakes are a perfect topic for nature’s archive. They’re often over generalized to fit a worst case stereotype, but they’re critically important to our food webs and ecosystems. And like so much of what we discuss. Once you start learning just a bit about them, you see how amazing and diverse they are.

[00:00:14] And there are few better suited to guide us through the world of snakes then Dr.

[00:00:18] Emily Taylor. Dr. Taylor is a professor of biological sciences at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and has been studying mating systems and physiology of rattlesnakes for 25 years. She’s also a founder of Project Rattle Cam, which monitors a huge Prairie Rattlesnake rookery in Colorado. She’s founder of central coast snake services and also an author.

[00:00:39] And in fact, her latest book, California Snakes And How to Find Them, comes out on May 7th, 20 24, which is literally tomorrow from the original release date of this podcast episode.

[00:00:50] Today we discussed the diversity of snakes across the United States. And I have to say, I kept saying United snakes when I tried to read this the first time.

[00:00:59] And of course, we also discuss how to find snakes, just like in the title of her book.

[00:01:02] We talk about what different snakes eat, why the king snake is named king snake. Why live animals, can’t simply claw their way out of a snake’s belly. And what it’s like to be surrounded by dozens of rattlesnakes, all rattling at the same time. Of course, we also discuss how snakes contribute to our ecosystems and the threats that they face. Dr.

[00:01:20] Taylor can be found on Instagram, Twitter, and threads as @snakeymama. And that is linked in the show notes. Also, if you happen to be listening to this podcast, the week of its release and he live near the San Francisco Bay Area, Dr.

[00:01:32] Taylor will be appearing at West Valley College on Friday, May 10th, giving her talk Secret Lives of Snakes. And also signing your books. So I’ll be there and I hope I can see some of you too. You can check emilytaylorscience.com for additional events and speaking engagements across California and information about all of the work that she does. So without further delay, Dr.

[00:01:53] Emily Taylor. Dr. Taylor, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:01:56] Dr. Emily Taylor: Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to talk about snakes.

[00:01:59] Michael Hawk: Yes, of course. Always. And as we were chatting a little bit here before hitting record I’ve been wanting to have this discussion for a long time, and now we have an excellent excuse. And that’s your new book that’s coming out here in what, just a, just a few weeks.

[00:02:13] Dr. Emily Taylor: That’s right. Yep. Been waiting a long time. It comes out on May 7th, 2024. California Snakes and How to Find Them. I’m really excited to talk to you about that book and about snakes more broadly.

[00:02:24] Michael Hawk: Great. And before we get into the details of all of that, I always like to ask this, because there’s always an interesting story, but where did you grow up and how did you get interested in nature?

[00:02:34] Dr. Emily Taylor: I was a Navy Brat, so I moved every two or three years of my life, so I don’t really have a home base. I lived all up and down the coasts west and east coasts of the United States. And then also some stints in Europe and Hawaii. So, I was not growing up running around chasing snakes in the backyard.

[00:02:50] I wasn’t scared of snakes, but I wasn’t particularly interested by them. I was a late bloomer herpetologist. It wasn’t until college. I went to UC Berkeley and it was a class called natural history of the vertebrates. A famous class that has single handedly switched many a pre med, pre vet student over into becoming a scientist by showing them animals in the wild.

[00:03:09] And that was what did it for me. And for me, it was the snakes.

[00:03:11] Michael Hawk: So part of that class was going out in the wild, looking for snakes.

[00:03:15] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yeah, the class was pretty amazing because you had two labs each week. One was in the classroom looking at, preserved specimens and learning about these animals. And then the other one was a field trip. And so every day, every week on Saturday, we would go out either birdwatching or mammal trapping or snake hunting. And of course I fell for the latter.

[00:03:32] Michael Hawk: Yeah, that’s, I think the hands on aspect is so important. I know I, I missed out on that. I’m a late bloomer as well, though. I didn’t take an academic route like you have. And I, I always think back to like my biology courses in high school and well, especially high school had, had a field component.

[00:03:50] Maybe things would have turned out very differently for me.

[00:03:54] Dr. Emily Taylor: I totally agree with you. I think that, the university I’m at right now, Cal Poly, our motto is learn by doing, and we have the students actually out there doing the various things they’re learning about, which is clearly what I was also doing at UC Berkeley in that natural history of the vertebrates class.

[00:04:07] We not only did we get a chance to really, see the animals up close, but we did our own research project and as part of that class. So they were doing the Learn by Doing thing back then. And it’s just super important for grabbing naturalists and grabbing scientists and showing them how to do those things and whether or not we would like them.

[00:04:21] And turns out I did. I liked it a lot. I needed more.

[00:04:24] Michael Hawk: What was it about the snakes that you were able to see in that class that hooked you?

[00:04:29] Dr. Emily Taylor: For me, there was a couple of different things. The first one was their relative rarity. So they were something that was a little bit harder to find. It was more of a challenge. You would go out and you would look around. When you found one, it was a big deal. And I think, rarity can breed appreciation in a lot of people because it’s not like a dime a dozen.

[00:04:44] And the second thing was the fact that There’s some danger involved, like the fact that rattlesnakes represented possibly danger, not that I was like, I want to get bit, nothing like that, but just because it was something that was, I don’t know, tomboyish and exotic to be interested in.

[00:05:00] And then I think first for the non rattlesnakes too, it was the idea of, like you said, being hands on, being able to pick up these animals and hold them in your hand and see them up close and appreciate them for what they are. And then after that, it really just turned into Whoa, how does this animal get all this stuff done without any hands?

[00:05:15] And what are these really cool adaptations that it has to be able to survive and thrive and pretty much rule the roost Without even being able to like chew up a bite of food or, all the things that they can do. It just amazed me.

[00:05:28] Michael Hawk: Yeah. And already the questions are just stirring so much. I often have a problem where there are so many questions wanting to come out. It’s hard for me to pick the one to start with. So why don’t we just start with a broad perspective? You’re talking about these amazing adaptations they have, their amazing lifestyles.

[00:05:46] Can you paint a picture of the diversity of snakes in California, maybe in North America more generally?

[00:05:52] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yeah, sure. We’re in a huge, diversity hotspot when it comes to snakes not as much as something like in the tropics, but in terms of temperate zones, California and the United States , has a really good number of snakes. So there’s about 50 species of snakes in California, depending on, some scientists might say that these two different groups of snakes are subspecies or they might be separate species, but so it’s around 50, give or take.

[00:06:15] Then again, depending on people’s opinions of the taxonomy, maybe there’s about 150 in the whole country. So California has a huge diversity of snakes because of the fact that it’s a, latitudinally big state because we have the coast influence because we have so many different habitats. We have desert, we have mountains. And there’s snakes from all different kinds of families as well. So we have vipers like rattlesnakes, there are boas like rosy boas and rubber boas. There’s little blind snakes. There’s just lots of different types of snakes and there’s about 4, 000 snake species in the entire world.

[00:06:49] So we’re doing pretty good in terms of a temperate area for our diversity. Both in terms of the number of species, but also their lifestyles.

[00:06:55] Michael Hawk: And let’s get into that a little bit. Like what are some of the, the most incredible adaptations that you like to point out about snakes and how they live their life. And I’m sure this is widely varied depending on which snake and which environment.

[00:07:08] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yeah, it varies a lot. One of the most impressive ones that I like to talk about is because it’s a subject of my current research in my lab at Cal Poly, is the ability of rattlesnakes to be able to go long, long, long periods of time without food and water. So I think people generally may know that snakes don’t have to eat as much as a mammal does, right?

[00:07:26] It’s an ectotherm. It doesn’t use a bunch of energy to produce its own body heat. It relies more on heat from the environment. Well, rattlesnakes, even compared to other snakes, have like an order of magnitude lower metabolism. So they’re just these machines sitting and waiting for something to run by.

[00:07:41] They shut down their whole body. They’re not spending barely any energy at all on keeping themselves alive. They’re just barely alive in these periods of time when there’s not a lot of food around, not a lot of water. They can easily withstand these droughts that extend throughout California for long periods of time.

[00:07:57] And then boom, a rodent runs by and switches on their metabolism. Their heart can grow overnight, by like a large amount in size, their kidneys up regulate, their gut starts to make these enzymes and they spend energy to be able to then eat that energy. So rattlesnakes can actually survive off of, well, they could probably survive off of no food for a year or two, but they only need like a single ground squirrel to maintain their body weight in one year, which is really, really amazing.

[00:08:26] That’s like the calories that are in about half of a Chipotle burrito. Pretty impressive what they can do. And then now our research is also showing that among vertebrates, they seem to have the ability to be able to withstand losing water and not being, not getting a replacement water in it by drinking for an extended period of time too.

[00:08:45] So the rattlesnake shall inherit the earth, right? We keep talking about cockroaches being the ones left over when we’re all gone, but it might be the rattlesnakes too.

[00:08:52] Michael Hawk: Wow. I’m kind of envisioning this situation where the rattlesnake is in this like low energy use state. And you mentioned a rodent could run by and it can snap out of it. So that initial snapping out of it where it catches the rodent, then, then it’s like that very night is when the heart grows and the kidneys upregulate and all of that just happening like hours later?

[00:09:13] Dr. Emily Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. So the data, this has been primarily studied in pythons, but it’s also been studied in rattlesnakes as well, including Brandon Kong, my graduate student right now, who I understand you’ve interviewed on this podcast before. His master’s research is on the effect of starvation on these animals and how it affects their organs.

[00:09:29] And they just can grow them overnight, literally within 24 hours, they dramatically up regulate and start churning away and doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So it’s really impressive that they can Shut everything down in times of scarcity and then up regulate it rapidly in times of plenty.

[00:09:44] Michael Hawk: Definitely, Let’s talk a little bit about their predation tactics as well. So different, well, maybe even we need to take a step back. What about diets? So when we’re looking at the spectrum of snakes in North America, the Western U. S., California specifically, are they all eating small mammals and birds and things like that, or are there other diets as well?

[00:10:06] Dr. Emily Taylor: This is a really fun question because my very first research project as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley was to study the diet of a specific species of snake. It was the Baja California rattlesnake and I got to cut open museum specimens and see what was inside of them. And so this is a really important part of natural history research because for conservation biology reasons and other reasons, knowing what animals eat is really, really important to understanding how to conserve them and also to see what role they play in the environment.

[00:10:32] And truly the role that snakes play in the environment, one of the most important parts of it is the role they play in the food web, both in terms of what they eat and what eats them. And so it varies dramatically the diet of a snake based on its position in the ecosystem. So we’ve got little tiny blind snakes in the genus Rena, for example, that eat like termite, and mainly termite eggs and larvae.

[00:10:54] Michael Hawk: And

[00:10:54] these snakes are like the size of a large worm,

[00:10:57] Dr. Emily Taylor: exactly. They, sometimes people mistake them for an earthworm if they see one out, but they have little scales on them. So they’re a snake. So they just eat like, little eggs. There are some species of snakes like the night snake, which is again, small about the size of a pencil.

[00:11:11] And they live off of lizards and lizard eggs. There are then plenty of bigger snakes that kind of graduate up to eating more vertebrates. So things like rattlesnakes in California, they eat primarily lizards, the smaller, smaller species, or when they’re, when they’re young. And then they. Grow up to eat more rodents, including some of the big rattlesnakes may eat larger rabbits.

[00:11:32] And then we have really fun ideas like the California Kingsnake, which is a diet generalist. They eat all kinds of things. They eat lizards, birds, frogs, and then they eat other snakes including rattlesnakes. And so they’re resistant to rattlesnake venom and they are a major predator of rattlesnakes, which is, I think, pretty exciting.

[00:11:48] A lot of people like to hear about that. They find it fascinating how the Kingsnakes can eat rattlesnakes.

[00:11:54] Michael Hawk: Is that why they’re called king snakes?

[00:11:56] Dr. Emily Taylor: You know what? I’m not sure about that. That’s a really good question. It very well might be. It’s maybe because of the fact, because I know that King Cobras over in in Asia also are snake eaters. In fact, their scientific name is Ophiophagus, eats snakes. So I’m sure that the word King has to do with the idea that both of these animals are the king of snakes because they eat other snakes, but I don’t know the exact etymology of that.

[00:12:17] Michael Hawk: Right. I, just this last weekend, our, our local county park had a snake pop up event. And I took my daughter over there and we got to see a couple of king snakes up close, which is which is really cool. They are beautiful snakes. And, do attract a slightly different perspective based on this varied diet that they have.

[00:12:37] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yes, they do. They’re amazing snakes. Yeah. Yeah. Even some people who don’t like snakes will. Post pictures of king snakes in their yard, which they leave unharmed, which is great. And I’ll say I had a good snake in my yard today. So even the most stalwart snake haters are going to appreciate king snakes.

[00:12:54] Michael Hawk: And I, I’m sure that like this audience, people that listen to Nature’s Archive, it’s a, it’s a good mix of naturalists and biologists and people that are generally very nature aware. But even then I encounter a lot of nature aware people that still have a fear of snakes. And yeah, the king snake is a good one, a good entry, entry level charismatic snake.

[00:13:13] Dr. Emily Taylor: Agreed.

[00:13:14] Michael Hawk: Now, where I was starting to go with this and backing up talking about the diets of snakes is the predation tactics. Do, do you find a similar variety in those tactics?

[00:13:25] Dr. Emily Taylor: California really has a good representation of some of the major varieties of ways that snakes can kill prey that we see across the globe. So for example, a lot of snakes are constrictors, where they will grab a snake, grab a prey with their mouth, and then they wrap their bodies around them and they squeeze them.

[00:13:42] So that includes things like The king snake we were just mentioning, gopher snakes, and many other species of non venomous snakes in California. And they don’t break the bones or anything, they are disrupting blood flow to and from the heart, and that’s how they kill the prey when they squeeze them like that.

[00:13:59] And then on the other side of the spectrum, we have things like venom. So California has rattlesnakes, which deliver venom via two hollow fangs that are attached to venom glands in their head. These animals have really complex venoms full of tons of proteins that are made to kill their prey, and to maybe help tenderize their prey from the inside out to help facilitate digestion, possibly.

[00:14:20] And then there’s a lot of other snakes that technically have a venom as well. They’re just not venomous to humans. They’re not dangerously venomous to humans. So garter snakes are a good example. They have smaller teeth that are in the back of their mouths. And they do produce a venom that helps to kill prey.

[00:14:33] Like for example, the maybe small rodents, but mostly frogs and fish that they eat and that venom is completely useless against people. And then finally, some snakes in California don’t really constrict and they don’t kill with venom. They just grab a prey and just wolf it down. And so things like coach whips are a good example of that.

[00:14:54] And some of the striped racers and whip snakes, they just grab prey and struggle. The struggling prey just disappears down their throat alive, which is pretty cool. Pretty crazy. As my students say, it’s metal.

[00:15:07] Michael Hawk: So here’s maybe, childish cartoonish perspective. So if a snake swallows some prey, whole, and that prey has sharp teeth and sharp claws. What’s going on inside the snake, before that prey finally succumbs?

[00:15:21] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yeah, unfortunately, although we like to think about the idea that the prey might be trying to scratch its way out or something, that’s probably not the case, because the digestive tract of the snake is like a thick walled muscle, and it has squeezed that animal’s arms up against the sides of its body, so it’s really immobile.

[00:15:37] And it will be relatively quickly, destroyed by the acidic contents of the snake’s stomach. That said, this is all stuff that we’re imagining because I don’t think anyone has ever, like, stuck a camera down there to see. I think it’d be a morbid study to follow the fate of a living animal as it goes down the snake’s maw.

[00:15:52] Michael Hawk: Yes, it would.

[00:15:53] Dr. Emily Taylor: It doesn’t happen that often, I should say, too. The vast majority of snakes kill their prey before eating them, for

[00:15:57] Michael Hawk: Okay. Okay. And back to the king snake and you said the king snake is a constrictor. So I I’m thinking about the anatomy of another snake. Like, let’s say the king snake, presumably it constricts rattlesnakes too. It constricts, okay. So that constriction, and sorry, again, if this is morbid, like I, I, I want to talk about how cool snakes are.

[00:16:19] And I’m talking about a lot of death here

[00:16:21] Dr. Emily Taylor: But it’s cool how they kill their prey, right? Everything’s got to eat.

[00:16:24] Michael Hawk: So, so the, the constriction, what is happening to that prey snake when it’s being constricted? Is it suffocating? Is it like something, damaging the vertebrae? Like what’s going on there?

[00:16:36] Dr. Emily Taylor: So this has really been studied primarily in constrictors killing mammals, but the principles should probably apply to any prey that’s being constricted. Historically there was a lot of hypotheses put forward, is it preventing them from breathing, is it literally squishing them and all of the data point to the idea that it is impacting the blood flow.

[00:16:55] So there’s this thing in physiology called the Frank Starling mechanism where it’s I don’t know, maybe a little bit dull for this type of podcast, but it basically says that the amount of blood leaving the heart should be proportional to the amount coming back. And so if you squeeze an animal’s cardiovascular system and put it under such.

[00:17:11] such pressure that alters the ability of the blood to leave the heart. So therefore, alters the ability of blood to come back to the heart and the blood flow stops. And then eventually the prey animals brain would cease activity, which is what’s actual death. Now, sometimes they may ingest the prey when it’s knocked out and before it’s entirely died.

[00:17:30] These are the kinds of things that really haven’t been studied in a lot of detail, but it certainly is incapacitated when they swallow it.

[00:17:36] Michael Hawk: definitely your, description. And by the way, I think it’s perfect for this podcast. Having these, I love like ecological concepts and especially when there’s a label and you can go look it up and learn more. But I, I think that helps at least paint a picture of some of what’s going on there.

[00:17:49] Dr. Emily Taylor: Awesome.

[00:17:50] Michael Hawk: what other kind of particularly fascinating or surprising behaviors have you seen exhibited? Or have you, have you or your lab studied?

[00:17:59] Dr. Emily Taylor: Well, I think that, my lab has done a lot of work over the years in physiology, right? We study things like energetics and thermal physiology, hydric physiology, how rattlesnakes are dealing with climate change from a temperature perspective, from a drought perspective, for example. But more recently we’ve really gotten interested in studying behavior.

[00:18:17] And then of course, as a naturalist, I just like to watch snake behaviors in the wild. And so I think there’s two things I can mention. The first one is something that comes up a lot in the book that I wrote, which is about snake watching, which is the idea that when I first started going out and looking for snakes for fun, I would pick up any snake that I found.

[00:18:35] Maybe not a rattlesnake right away, but I’d pick up other ones and I wanted to look at it right away. And that’s really changed a lot in recent years because I’ve realized that if I You know, step back and watch the snake. I might get to see something really cool. So the book talks a lot about that ethos, about the idea that, yeah, we understand why we do wanna pick up snakes and how that can be appropriate.

[00:18:53] Sometimes I’m not gonna try to tell people they shouldn’t ever pick up snakes. But also sometimes, picking up these animals can be stressful to them and furthermore, you might miss some really cool stuff. So in the book, I talk about cool things. Like my students and I were at a campground once and we saw this gopher snake crossing the campground and one of the students was about to go pick it up.

[00:19:09] I said, let’s, let’s wait and see. He looks like he’s, he’s on the way somewhere. And we watched this gopher snake cross the campground, crawl up a huge oak tree, And into a great horned owl nest where the adults started dive bombing this gopher snake and my students were like, what is happening? And I said, I think I know what’s happening.

[00:19:25] And despite all the dive bombing, the gopher snake came down about half an hour later with two big lumps in its belly. And so it had, it had eaten the chicks of these great horned owls. And I’ll quote, that’s really sad, right? Some people, I thought it was pretty amazing that we got to see this. Of course, if we had picked up that gopher snake, we would have missed that entirely.

[00:19:45] So seeing these really cool behaviors is something that you can do if you sit back and watch snakes and don’t interfere with them. That’s my first thing. The second thing is that I’ve recently become pretty obsessed with snake behavior. through a research project that I started with my collaborator Scott Bobak from Dickinson College.

[00:20:02] It’s called Project Rattlecam and this project involves using new technology to be able to spy on snakes with secret cameras. So, Long story short, and I can tell you more about this later if you’re curious, is we have a, years of putting time lapse cameras on rattlesnakes in these big gatherings so we can go back and study them later on.

[00:20:20] But three years ago, we also started a live streaming camera. I mean, everyone’s putting live streaming cameras in Eagle’s nests and hawk nests and falcon nests. It’s about time we have one in a rattlesnake nest. And indeed there’s these communal birthing areas that some rattlesnakes go to. And I’m very excited because this May, 2024, we’re putting up the first live streaming camera at a big rattlesnake den where there’s going to be lots of activity of snakes all year round.

[00:20:44] And we’ve just learned so much from that already. So we’ve learned. That when the babies are born, the mothers don’t necessarily just take care of their own babies, that the babies move around and interact with lots of other still pregnant mothers, and it’s something that’s called babysitting.

[00:20:58] We’ve learned that the babies are born thirsty already and that instinctively they’ll curl up into these little cinnamon roll shapes and collect rainwater on their backs when it’s raining, like the day they’re born, which is pretty impressive. And we’re just learning lots of more really, really cool things from this feed, Project Rattlecam, which I should mention, it’s a community science project.

[00:21:17] So people who can check that out at rattlecam. org, especially starting up in May can participate in helping us to collect the data and in being able to have the privilege of peering into the private lives of these snakes in ways that shows what snakes are actually like, not the kind of fake things that you see on TV shows.

[00:21:34] Michael Hawk: I’ve looked at project rattle cam in the past. And if I recall the cameras were maybe, were they in Colorado?

[00:21:41] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yeah, so we had the time lapse cameras in a big mega den, we call it, in Colorado of Prairie Rattlesnakes, and then I wanted to put the live streaming camera there. Turns out that the live streaming cameras that you see on wildlife are not easy to put in. If it was you know a Peregrine falcon nest that’s on a building on a campus that’s pretty easy because you have a access to power and wifi, but to get that stuff done remotely is a huge challenge, especially in a place that is very difficult to access and doesn’t have good cell signal. So anyway, we have been working for years to get that installed in Colorado. So I’ve had the live stream in California at a much closer, easier to access den for the past three years, but we finally have cracked the code and it’s going in to this Megaden in Colorado, where we can watch hundreds of prairie rattlesnakes at once in May.

[00:22:28] And I should say, this is really cool too, because it’s not just a static camera. This is a remote controlled camera that we can pan and tilt and zoom. So someone who’s watching on YouTube can tell us, Can you zoom in on that snake over there? And we’ll do it for them. Right then and there. So, and it’s just such a really, it’s a neat, intimate experience with these rattlesnakes to see, the moms taking care of the babies and the snakes babysitting.

[00:22:51] And we’ll be able to have it on at night too, cause it’s a 24 hour camera. So we’ll be able to see any predators that visit the den. It’s just going to be a, obviously for, in terms of looking and seeing what rattlesnakes do, that’s really important and providing access to the public, it’s really exciting.

[00:23:04] But this is the first time ever in any animal, any kind of animal that we’ll be able to actually have. 100 percent surveillance of them at all times to know what they do with all of their time, day and night. Think about any other animal. You can’t do that because it flies away or it hides or something like that, but we’ll be able to do that, which is so exciting.

[00:23:21] Can you tell I’m excited?

[00:23:23] Michael Hawk: I’m excited too. It’s, it’s rubbing off on me. So you said May, is it, is it May because that’s when it’s going in or maybe because that’s when the snakes become active.

[00:23:31] Dr. Emily Taylor: It’s both. So the Project Rattlecam’s site in Colorado is a high elevation site. And so the snakes are still under a bunch of snow right now. And so we’re heading out there to install the camera in the very end of April, both because that’s when the ground will thaw enough for us to drill into the ground to set the camera up.

[00:23:47] And also because that’s right about the time the snakes start to wake up. So I think in the beginning of May, we’ll see snakes occasionally. And then based on experience from visiting by mid to the end of May, there’s going to be lots and lots of snakes males, females, babies, everyone comes out of this.

[00:24:01] Volcanic outcrop where they’ve been spending the winter underground together under the snow line and they all bask during the day all day long. They interact. They have all these cool social interactions. And then in the beginning of June, the males and the non pregnant females will all leave and they’ll travel for miles around into the prairie to hunt, but the pregnant females are going to stay behind and the pregnant females will stay back there basking in the sun, probably getting eaten by red tailed hawks.

[00:24:26] Who knows? And then they’ll have their babies in September. And so we’ll be able to watch that maternal care and check them out. And it’s very short season that they have before the males and the other females come back in September and October. So it’s a short active season. It’s only about four months long that they have over there in Colorado because they’re under snow the rest of the year.

[00:24:44] Michael Hawk: So when they’re under snow are they hibernating or like, what, what would you call their state of condition during the winter?

[00:24:51] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yes. I think most people call it hibernation. There are some people who like to grouse about word choice and fuss over things, but as a physiologist, it doesn’t bother me at all. Hibernation is an appropriate term. Some mammal biologists like to use it differently, but they have a metabolic depression. In the case of rattlesnakes, the metabolism is depressed or lowered because of the fact that it’s so cold out.

[00:25:12] So we’ve had temperature data loggers in the snakes throughout the winter and their body temperature gets to be just almost to freezing. So they don’t quite freeze. They just keep their body temperature about one or two degrees Celsius. And they do that by going down these deep fissures and cracks in the rocks to far below the frost line.

[00:25:26] And we don’t know what it looks like down there. We can’t get cameras down there. It’s just, too deep, but there’s just lots of, lots of snakes. So we think there’s probably like 2000 rattlesnakes at this combined, there’s two little peaks that are side by side, which is a lot of rattlesnakes.

[00:25:41] Michael Hawk: Yeah, that’s, that’s crazy. I can’t imagine stumbling across an emergence of rattlesnakes coming outta hibernation at, at a den site like that. That’s gotta be something.

[00:25:52] Dr. Emily Taylor: It’s pretty amazing to see, let me tell you. I mean, we as scientists know what to look for, but you see this rocky outcrop surrounded by a ton of prairie. And my, and my colleague, Scott Boback, was on a hunting trip when he saw it. He’s like, can I go up there? He went up there. Sure enough, tons of snakes.

[00:26:04] And once when I was up there, I decided to, to see something because, when you go up there, the snakes are scared of you. So they all dive down into these, little holes. And that’s, again, the beauty of the camera is that we’re watching their natural behaviors when they’re not scared and stressed by the presence of the researcher.

[00:26:19] That’s beautiful for science. But anyway, I sat down and I just sat down and sat still and the snake started to come out and they were like giving me side eye. I was like, is that person? But I sat. Super still. And I just waited. And within about an hour, they all had come back out and just curled up all around me because I had become part of the background.

[00:26:36] So I was just surrounded by dozens and dozens and dozens of snakes. And they just curl up and they start interacting and doing their thing. And it was the coolest experience to just sit there and watch them and to see how they actually are when I’m not trying to catch them or trying to otherwise study them or harass them.

[00:26:51] So that’s what everyone’s going to get to do now without having to actually be there. Everyone gets to see that and participate in that from the comfort of your own couch or your desk. So get a new, get an extra monitor to put alongside your other monitor so that you can just have it on the snake cam all day long.

[00:27:07] Michael Hawk: I’ll link to uh, cheap monitors for people to add to their computers in the show notes. No,

[00:27:12] I won’t, I won’t do that, but I will link to Project Rattlecam for sure. So when, I’m just trying to imagine this, when you were sitting there still watching the behavior, and this might involve some conjecture, did the snakes not realize you were there, or just because you weren’t acting like a human, they, they weren’t concerned about you, or, you have any thoughts as to why they became comfortable with you sitting right there?

[00:27:36] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yeah, I think it’s definitely conjecture, but the snakes, when I, they would, they were looking at me when they first came out, so they recognized that I was not just part of the background, but then after a while, when I didn’t move a muscle at all, They just decided it was okay. And so I think that, snakes, the cognition that they have is, it’s difficult for us to understand.

[00:27:55] It’s definitely not the same level of, reasoning through various options and various outcomes and consequences that we have. I think they’re really responding to, is that a threat? And then there’s no movement of that threat over time. Okay, fine. Then I’m going to come back out and do my thing.

[00:28:10] Because of course, when I eventually stood up to leave, they all, ‘Oh my God, Oh, I’m so scared’ and ran away again. So

[00:28:16] Michael Hawk: Did you get a lot of concurrent rattling when that happened or they just run away or slither away?

[00:28:22] Dr. Emily Taylor: yes, they rattle like crazy. The ones in the Prairie rattlesnake den. Rattlesnakes have just very different personalities. Both some species are more likely to rattle than others, and some individuals are more likely to rattle than others. But these prairie rattlesnakes are the dens. When you walk up, there’s just like a couple of males, we think, that kind of start the whole thing.

[00:28:40] Maybe, maybe they’re lookout males, who knows? And then everybody just starts rattling. And so I think being up there with your ankles just surrounded by. Dozens, even hundreds of rattlesnakes at once. It’s, it’s some people’s worst nightmare, but it’s, it’s, it’s truly a privilege. Like it’s such an amazing privilege to be able to find a spot like that.

[00:28:58] These mega dens that are relatively uncommon because most rattlesnakes don’t den up in those huge dens. Like here in California, those are rare here in California snakes, either over winter or in the cold. by themselves, like in a squirrel burrow, or maybe in a rock outcrop with a few other snakes. At high elevations, you can find some dens of rattlesnakes that may have tens or twenties, but nothing like these multiple hundreds or thousands.

[00:29:19] So it really is just a neat thing to see. Of course, wearing the right footwear is very important, but as long as you take precautions, those snakes want nothing to do with you. And

[00:29:29] Michael Hawk: do you by chance have any audio recordings of like dozens of rattlesnakes rattling at the same time?

[00:29:36] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yes.

[00:29:37] Michael Hawk: I would love to hear that. If it’s possible to share it in some way, I would love to hear that. I, every rattlesnake encounter I’ve had where they’ve rattled, it’s just such a memorable experience. And for someone like me, I’ve only heard a rattlesnake rattle maybe 10 times. I’ve, seen more rattlesnakes that slither away without rattling, but not a lot. So they, they can all, I can picture everywhere I’ve been, including once in my backyard in San Jose, California, there was a rattlesnake that seemed to be shedding its skin.

[00:30:03] And I, I don’t know if it was seeking refuge to try to shed its skin or exactly what was happening, but it was right by my trash can. And I walked by it to drop off the trash, turned around and it was right there and it rattled at me. So it didn’t mind me the first pass, but the second pass, it’s like, okay, what are you doing?

[00:30:24] And quite, quite the experience, unexpected experience.

[00:30:27] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yes, absolutely. I mean, that’s, I think lots of people in California who have those stories about rattlesnakes found in their yards. And let’s face it, there is a difference between watching rattlesnakes on a camera, like a camera with Project Rattlecam or hiking and having the privilege of seeing one crossing the trail in front of you and then having one in your yard.

[00:30:46] So that’s why I started my company, Central Coast Snake Services. We do free snake relocation out of people’s yards here in the Central Coast. And there’s lots of people who do that throughout California as well. So, people who know how to put that snake, from one place into another spot, that’s going to be, a good outcome for that snake.

[00:31:02] If any of your listeners are interested, there’s a website called freesnakerelocation. org where they can go and they can find out, I’m actually, I’m not sure if I got that right. You’ll have to edit that out. It might, might be, it might be freesnakerelocationdirectory. org. I’ll let you know.

[00:31:16] But the point is there’s a place that people can go and find people to do that for them if they’d like.

[00:31:21] Michael Hawk: Okay. Just to clarify that resource, it doesn’t look like there’s a direct URL that goes to the free snake relocation directory.

[00:31:28] but there is a map that you can zoom in on and click and see who is in your area. So I’ve included a link to that in the show notes.

[00:31:36] That’s a great resource to, to have on hand. And in my case, you know, it startled me, but I wasn’t, necessarily scared of it. So I went in and I got my camera and I went back out to take some pictures of it. And then I went to get my kids so they could see it. And and at that point it was gone.

[00:31:55] So it was just passing through, I think who knows where it went, but a fun experience. You mentioned that some snakes, some rattlesnakes are more apt to rattle, others not and here in California, I’ve always called them Western rattlesnakes, and I know there’s some subspecies and things like that, but I’ve been told, I don’t know, If, if this is true, so you can tell me if it’s true, but I’ve been told that the Western rattlesnake tends to be a little bit less aggressive or less more docile, I suppose it would be a better way of positioning it than, than other rattlesnakes.

[00:32:28] Is, is that accurate?

[00:32:30] Dr. Emily Taylor: Well, so first of all, yeah, it was great that you thought about your language there because people say the word aggressive a lot. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but truly aggression is something that an animal, like one animal being aggressive towards another usually means that they’re not trying to defend themselves. They’re like actually maybe trying to eat that other animal. And of course, rattlesnakes aren’t going to eat us. So rattlesnakes are technically never aggressive to us, but they can defend themselves aggressively. Right? So, so I like to use the word defensive, right?

[00:32:59] That rattles, some rattlesnakes are more defensive than others. And I will say a couple of different things. is that it’s been very difficult for people to quantify this. There’s been some studies that have been done where you walk up to a rattlesnake with fake hand. It’ll be like a stuffed glove on a stick that goes towards it.

[00:33:15] And then you can quantify how the rattlesnake reacts. And for the most part, those studies have been, well, they’re few and far between, but they have really just showed one thing and one thing only, which is that rattlesnake defensive behavior varies super dramatically. So it’s based on the posture that they were in.

[00:33:31] For example, they are more likely to rattle if they’re already stretched out. So if they’re curled up like a cinnamon roll, they’re unlikely to rattle because that’s their first line of defense is camouflage. And they’re only going to start rattling if they really think they’ve been found out, which if they’re already crawling, they probably already have.

[00:33:46] And then it varies according to snakes. So I’ve spent so much time over the years, radio tracking, many dozens of snakes, and that’s been Western rattlesnakes here in California, Western diamondback rattlesnakes, a different species in Arizona, and then prairie rattlesnakes up in Colorado, as well as just hiking around and seeing other species.

[00:34:01] Some individuals are just. Like to rattle at you from like 20 feet away. They’re like, Hey, and most individuals, though, I would say 80, 85%, no matter what species you’re talking about, will not rattle. Now I told you the prairie rattlesnakes like to rattle, but that’s like at those dens where there’s one of them sets off a bunch of other ones.

[00:34:19] If you’re out in the, Prairie in the summer and you come across one again, not as likely to rattle. So the, the propensity to rattle is overblown on TV. They want to show rattlesnakes all rattling and lunging and looking terrifying, but the reality is that rattlesnakes mostly just curl up and sit there and even rattlesnakes that we go into people’s yards and capture and relocate usually don’t rattle.

[00:34:39] So, yeah, I would say that the Western rattlesnake by and large. is very unlikely to give itself away by rattling. Maybe some other species are a little bit more likely on average, but it gets washed out with individual variation. They have personalities just like we do.

[00:34:53] Michael Hawk: I wish that there was a technology like in Star Trek, like a life form indicator that you could just take with you and be like, Oh, today on my five mile hike, I passed seven rattlesnakes and didn’t even know it. It’s like, it’s got, those numbers have to be through the roof when you…

[00:35:07] think

[00:35:07] Dr. Emily Taylor: are. I know exactly what you’re talking about. Yes, because we miss so many of them. And that’s why we’re like, for all the rattlesnakes you’ve missed a whole bunch more. Sometimes people don’t like hearing that, but it’s absolutely true. And I’ve thought that many times that I wish there was something where I could just like, The beacon would just tell me where the snake was, but, cause I needed them for research or something like that, but then it actually would take all the fun away.

[00:35:26] Right. So the, the finding the snakes in the wild as well. Just as much fun as actually looking for the snakes in the wild is just as much fun as actually finding them.

[00:35:36] Michael Hawk: So when we were talking about some of the dietary choices of, of snakes, not just rattlesnakes, but snakes in general, I was thinking about all the all the pesticides and rodenticides and things that are used across, the board in agricultural areas and in suburban areas and, all points in between.

[00:35:54] Which leads me to a broader question. What is the general conservation status of snakes? And are they affected by some of these, pesticides and rodenticides that are prevalent?

[00:36:07] Dr. Emily Taylor: Yeah, this is a great question. So first off, in terms of the conservation status in California of most species of snakes are doing all right. They’re doing pretty well, especially if you compare that to, for example, California amphibians, where we have a pretty high number of endangered species. There are some types of snakes that are very sensitive in California.

[00:36:26] So the giant garter snake is an endangered species. We’ve got things like the Alameda whip snake the San Francisco garter snake, which are subspecies that are, that are very rare. There’s also a rattlesnake species, the red diamond rattlesnake down in San Diego, that is a California species of special concern.

[00:36:41] And so that, that is kind of like saying it’s not endangered yet, but we really need to watch out for that. And there’s a couple other species that fall under that same moniker, but for the most part, most snakes are doing pretty well. There’s been no studies done in California on whether rodenticides or other pesticides are impacting snakes. Lots of studies are being done in Australia showing that snakes can be secondarily poisoned by eating, for example, a poisoned rat, a poisoned, rodents of some kind.

[00:37:10] So we know that it can happen, but there’s no studies that I know of that are occurring in California right now. We regularly see at Central Coast Snake Services, which operates in Santa Barbara and SLO counties, regularly see snakes that are caught inside rodent traps. So they go in there after a rodent and then they get caught and stuck.

[00:37:29] Occasionally we’ll come across snakes that are acting kind of funny. Like they have a neurological disorder and they may have been poisoned. I’m just guessing here that in some cases they recover from that. There’s probably some snakes that die from that, that we don’t ever really know about. No systematic study on this.

[00:37:44] It’s something that’s really interesting because California, as you might kno