“In my opinion, we may not be releasing enough snakes,” said Folt, the lead author of the study published recently in Animal Conservation.
Since then, reintroduction has expanded to include the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve in Florida, a property of The Nature Conservancy.īut a new study shows that the chances of success of these reintroduction programs could be greatly improved by altering the release plans. Wildlife managers and biologists have collected snakes in the wild in Georgia and Florida - many of them seized by law enforcement, said Brooke Talley, who was previously the Reptile and Amphibian Conservation Coordinator. Within the last few years, additional wild snakes from Florida have entered the captive collection, now housed at the Orianne Center for Indigo Conservation, of Central Florida Zoo. The released animals were reared from wild-caught parents that came from stable Georgia populations. In 2010, the first reintroduction program began in Alabama’s Conecuh National Forest. But thanks to efforts to conserve gopher tortoises and active habitat management and restoration, some areas were deemed suitable for indigo snake reintroduction. Gopher tortoises are listed federally as threatened in the western portion of their range, and considered state-threatened in Florida, so tampering with eggs and burrows or killing tortoises is now illegal.Ī large number of reintroduction projects fail, according to recent analysis, often because managers reintroduce animals back into degraded habitats that they haven’t fixed. Many of these problems have stopped in recent years. Indigo snakes are considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Tortoise numbers also declined due to habitat degradation from fire suppression strategies in the area, said TWS member Brian Folt, a postdoctoral researcher at Auburn University. People were also harvesting the tortoises themselves for food, Elmore said.
But the burrows had been gassed for decades in an effort to flush out eastern diamondback rattlesnakes ( Crotalus adamanteus) from the holes as part of rattlesnake roundups, annual events involving the capturing of snakes for sale, food, display or to be used in animal products. Indigo snakes use tortoise burrows, especially during winter in parts of their range that drop below freezing. One of the problems the team addressed was the concurrent loss of gopher tortoises ( Gopherus polyphemus). Under the guidance of the Eastern Indigo Snake Reintroduction Committee, a group of stakeholders - including state wildlife managers from Florida, Georgia and Alabama - as well as federal wildlife managers and representatives from the Orianne Center for Indigo Conservation, a partner of the Central Florida Zoological Society and the Orianne Society that founded it, partners have been working to restore snake habitats and plan reintroductions since the early 2000s. The snakes were extirpated from much of their western range - the Florida Panhandle, Alabama and Mississippi - by the start of the new millennium. While this problem has lessened in recent years, habitat loss and death from car strikes continue to create obstacles to their recovery. The reptiles have been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act since 1978 due to being captured for the pet trade. Fish and Wildlife Service.īut the striking appearance of the eastern indigo snake ( Drymarchon couperi) is also partly the reason for its decline. They’re large, they’re interesting - they’re beautiful,” said Michele Elmore, the species’ lead biologist for the U.S. But just blink and catch the orange-throated serpent in a different light and the sheen of its back might glisten in a deep, dark blue occasionally speckled with white or beige checkers. At the right angle, the second longest native snake in the United States and Canada is a shimmery black.
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