The key to protecting rattlesnakes from extinction? Clearing their name and reputation
These antiheroes of the American West are actually not so bad. New research reveals they're good parents and neighbors, and their venom may help save lives.
The night of near-continuous rattlesnakes was mellow: the temperature pleasant, the humidity low, the beer cold. Under a crescent moon, the electric golf cart rolled silently over hilly paths. When our headlights illuminated a venomous snake, Matt Goode would hop out—a drink in his right hand, a snake stick in his left—and calmly present the creature for my inspection. Unlike the amped-up fellows on YouTube snatching hissing vipers from beneath wooden boards, Goode never shouted “Dude!”
It was early September, and the herpetologist’s field season was winding to a close. For over 20 years the University of Arizona research scientist and his students have been capturing snakes, including western diamondback rattlesnakes, tiger rattlesnakes, and black-tailed rattlesnakes. They have found more than 7,000 so far on the cart paths of Oro Valley’s Stone Canyon golf course, just north of Tucson, and on the private roads dotted with multimillion-dollar homes that surround it.
On the best nights, Goode’s team might bag up to 20 snakes. In a campus lab the next day, his students measure, sex, weigh, and mark them for recapture (using paint on their rattles and inserting tiny microchips under their skin), then return them to their site of capture. Goode’s central research question—how does the ongoing conversion of pristine desert to housing developments affect snakes?—posed something of a conservation paradox. Compared with snakes in more natural areas, the Stone Canyon ones are growing larger, producing more offspring, and expanding their ranges among the McMansions. It helps, perhaps, that most homeowners are absent during the hottest months.
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