EXCITEMENT AT
THE COMPOST BIN
Last Monday around noon I returned from the
market to find several folks standing around the compost bin with body languages saying
"Look at that!" When I got there Pancho told me they'd corner a
"coralillo," a coral snake. In the Yucatan I got used to coral snakes being
nocturnal, and nearly always in the past when people told me they had a coral snake it
turned out to be a mimic species, so I didn't get too excited.
However, it turned out to be the real thing. Just to make sure my mind wasn't playing
tricks I recited to myself the handy little verse:
Red on yellow,
Will kill a fellow...
And that's what it had. You can see the red bands looking like they were applied atop
wider yellow bands below:
It was the Eastern Coral Snake, MICRURUS FULVIUS, which is different from what we had
in the Yucatan, which was the Variable Coral Snake, Micrurus diastema. Our
Eastern Coral Snake was the same species found in the US Deep South and, as we see,
through Texas into eastern and central Mexico. It's described as being "mostly
diurnal," meaning that it comes out during the day. Often I've mentioned the
advantages of being able to make assumptions about unknown species by extrapolating
certain kinds of information already known about other species belonging to the same
genus, but here's an example of how making such assumptions can sometimes be dangerous.
I don't particularly enjoy handling venomous snakes but it was clear that this one
couldn't remain among the office buildings -- even though it provided a valuable service
keeping the mouse population down around the compost heap. Therefore, with the snake's
head pinned with a stick, I took him in my hand, snapped the above picture, put him into a
two-liter Coke bottle with a cap on it, and gave him to Pancho to release in the
mountains, which he did.
A funny thing about that picture: When I downloaded it into my computer, for an instant
I thought I surely had the wrong picture, for the snake I remembered grabbing had
certainly been at least three times longer and thicker than the teeny little thing shown
in my hand... |