Winter is Coming: What is an ectotherm to do?
As 2017 rapidly draws to a close, the nights have gotten cooler in southern Georgia, with some semblance of winter arriving in the not so distant future. For reptiles and amphibians, shortening day lengths and the arrival of cooler weather signal a shift in behavior and a need to find winter refugia. Reptiles and amphibians […]
First Finds of Indigo Survey Season
Dirk Stevenson, Director of our Longleaf Savannas Initiative (LSI), and Ben Stegenga, LSI Field Technician, found the very first Eastern Indigo Snake of the survey season earlier this week. Cool nights have Indigos and Eastern Diamond-backed Rattlesnakes moving back to Gopher Tortoise burrow dens in Longleaf Pine–Wiregrass sandhill habitats. As an added, and most unusual […]
Little Indigo
Ben Stegenga of The Orianne Society, photographed here with Matt Elliott, Nongame Biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, recently captured a small male Eastern Indigo Snake (4 feet long) at a private land in South Georgia. The snake—found prowling the shadows of a dark, now dry, creek swamp at high noon—was probably foraging. […]
Migratory Snakes
The changing seasons have the snakes on the move, heading for cover, returning to dens where they will overwinter (this is called “ingress”, i.e., the act of going in). Of our Coastal Plain snakes, adult Eastern Indigo Snakes disperse around April to May, up to one to three or more miles from Gopher Tortoise colonies […]
What’s on the Menu? The Diet of the Alligator Snapper
Alligator snapping turtles are the only turtles in the world to have evolved an oral predatory lure. These turtles have a forked, vermiform (“worm-like”) fishing lure on the upper surface of their tongues. When a gator snapper detects nearby fish, the red-wigglerish bait, engorged with blood and buoyant in water, becomes erect and starts to […]