Why Rattlesnakes Are Bold Road Crossers
Nov. 7 -- Why did the snake cross the road?
Maybe to swallow that proverbial chicken that wanted to see what was on the other side. Or maybe it didn't want to cross the road at all, because it had no stomach for what it might encounter along the way.
That may all sound a bit trivial, but it's serious science to Kimberly Andrews, a master's candidate in conservation ecology at the University of Georgia. Andrews and her faculty adviser, ecology professor Whitfield Gibbons, are up to their fangs in snakes these days, trying to answer questions that, frankly, not a lot of people have asked.
The research involves releasing all sorts of snakes along a section of roadway near the university's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory to see how, why and even if they are willing to try their luck at crossing about 15 feet of concrete. Andrews set up the two-year experiment, she says, because not a whole lot is known about why snakes are willing to cross a road.
What is known is that a lot of them don't make it.
"About a million vertebrates a day die on American roadways," she says.
Fragmented Terrain
No one knows exactly how many of those are snakes, because snakes in the wild are so secretive that it's hard to keep records on road kills, but Gibbons, a leading herpetologist, says it's a lot. Of course, you've got to have a lot of snakes to have a lot of road kills, so the figures vary greatly from one area to the next.
"I have personally seen as many as 20 dead snakes along a 10-mile stretch of road," says Gibbons, who spends a lot of time looking for snakes. "During a 30-year study in Florida, about seven snakes per day were found dead on a stretch of less than 20 miles of highway."
So given those odds, why would any snake want to venture across the road?
That's among the questions Andrews is trying to answer. Gibbons hints at one reason, even though the project is only half completed.
Most road kills among reptiles, he says, occur during mating season.
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