What are Snakes Good For?
No other kind of animal can rival the curiosity and sensations that snakes represent. Snakes are skilled hunters and ambush predators that find, identify, and track their prey using their highly developed senses of sight, taste, hearing, and touch. While most snakes utilize their strong, muscular bodies to crush their food to death, certain snakes employ a fatal quantity of venom, a modified form of saliva, to immobilize and kill their prey.
Snakes are very mobile animals, capable of moving over sand and rocks, burrowing in the soil, squeezing between cracks and crevasses in rocks, climbing almost vertical rock walls and the thinnest tree branches, and even swimming at a rapid pace. All of this is accomplished without the need of limbs.
The United States is home to a wide variety of snakes, from tiny ones that may be mistaken for earthworms to enormous pythons that are as thick as a man's thigh. They come in a rainbow of hues and patterns, most of which reflect their environment, but some of them are vividly banded and flecked or shine brilliantly in the sun. Snakes may be found in many types of settings in North America, including our backyards, freshwater streams, the wilderness, and the ocean.
The Significance of Snakes: Preservation and Conservation
Land clearance for agriculture, urban development, and the introduction of animals like domestic pets and cane toads have all led to the endangerment of several snake species. All life on Earth, including humans, depends on maintaining a high degree of biodiversity, and snakes play a significant role in that richness. In North America, we tend to forget that a significant number of the middle-order predators that maintain the health of our natural ecosystems are snakes and other reptiles.
Snakes are Essential for Reducing Pest Population Growth
There would be severe repercussions if, when you woke up tomorrow, there were no longer any snakes. Numerous 'pest' animals will soon experience population booms and become impossible to control. Since rodents are often the reservoirs for illnesses like Lyme disease, which may also affect people, it might be more severe. Snakes greatly slow the transmission of zoonotic infections by slithering about in our backyards. Snakes are an underappreciated hero!
Snakes are Necessary for the Food Chain
Snakes have a particularly special place in the food chain. Snakes are predators, however several animals also use them as food. A mesopredator is an organism that plays this sort of part in an ecosystem. Smaller creatures including rodents, insects, amphibians, eggs, birds, and the larval stages of numerous invertebrates are the usual prey that snakes pursue. That menu is impressive! They hunt, but they also turn into the prey. Many other, bigger predators, like foxes and birds, won't hesitate to devour a snake. Given the dynamic function that snakes play in the food chain, maintaining each ecosystem depends entirely on their existence.
Download the SnakeSnap App on Google Play or the Apple iTunes Store and get a free trial.