This article was written by Emily Taylor, PhD, a member of the ASP Board of Directors.
Research should be fun! If it isn’t, you’re not doing it right. That’s what I tell my students, at least. As field biologists, we are privileged to conduct research in the great outdoors on the wild animals that we love. We get to decide what questions to ask, design experiments, and watch the animals respond, so we have the freedom to choose the most fascinating research questions. There is no better example of this than our recent study published in Current Zoology, in which we studied the rain-harvesting behavior of wild Prairie Rattlesnakes in Colorado.
This research was led by undergraduate Madi McIntyre, a student in Scott Boback’s lab at Dickinson College. All of us spent a month in Colorado in summer 2021, collaboratively conducting a multitude of projects. The field site has multiple rookeries where dozens of pregnant females bask all summer long and eventually give birth.
Rattlesnakes in high-elevation, northern Colorado emerge from hibernation extremely dehydrated. The main source of drinking water of pregnant females that remain at summer rookeries is rain, but storms are few and far between. So, rattlesnakes maximize their rain harvesting by coiling up to collect rain within their coils, then drinking from their skin. Madi was interested in how sociality (i.e., large groups of snakes piled up together) impacts their drinking behavior.
To examine rain-harvesting behavior, Madi snuck up on wild snakes and carefully positioned the nozzle of a pump sprayer over their heads to simulate rain. Most rattlesnakes immediately changed their position and drank, allowing us to create the first illustrated ethogram of snake rain-harvesting behavior. We found that snakes drank from the ground and from their own bodies at about equal frequencies and drank off a neighbor less often. Snakes tolerated other snakes drinking from their bodies 100% of the time; this appears to be a reciprocal behavior that does not elicit competition. We described interesting behaviors including how snakes angled their heads, and even their bodies, to maximize rain harvesting. For example, in addition to flattening the body to help catch rain on the surface, some snakes that were resting on hills would tilt their bodies downhill, causing water to move down their body with gravity, where it accumulated, allowing them to drink. Smart snakes!
Ultimately these behaviors help rattlesnakes maintain hydration under circumstances where it is difficult to get enough water. With projected increased droughts throughout the American West, rain-harvesting behavior will become more and more essential. In addition, this research was really fun to do, popular with the media, and people find rain-harvesting rattlesnakes to be adorable, making this research project important for improving rattlesnake public relations.
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