Eastern Ratsnake

For Throwback Thursday, here's a picture from a little over 9 years ago, probably taken from a smartphone. It's an Eastern Ratsnake I met at Sourland Mountain Preserve. I was walking down a rocky path when I suddenly encountered the snake. Though startling, I knew that this mostly-black snake couldn't be either of my area's 2 venomous snakes (i.e. Copperhead, Eastern Timber Rattlesnake). Though I thought the snake was pretty big at the time, they can apparently get much bigger than this fella; they can get up to 7 feet long.

When I posted this to iNaturalist, I tentatively IDed it as a Northern Black Racer. I got the comment that in my area the Northern Black Racer wouldn't have that dim pattern on the back, which then left what my field guide called the Black Ratsnake. But apparently my field guide is a little out of date concerning the ratsnakes, and this is now classified as an Eastern Ratsnake.

Apparently the ratsnakes used to be categorized mostly by color, with names like Black, Yellow, and Gray Ratsnakes, but problems arose when it became clear that some Black Ratsnake populations were more closely related to Yellow Ratsnakes than they were with other Black Ratsnakes. Color didn't seem to be a good categorization for these reptiles.

Sooo ... eventually hardworking herpetologists determined that geography was a better way to categorize our ratsnake friends. Our Eastern Ratsnakes comprise the ratsnakes east of the Appalachian Mountains, the Central Ratsnake lives mostly between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains, and the Western Ratsnake lives west of the Mississippi River. It might be that they could interbreed, though mountains and rivers have generally kept the populations separate long enough for separate species to emerge.

Though I'm sure these guys consider rats to be delicious, their diet is a lot more varied than that. They'll eat rodents, other reptiles, amphibians, birds, and eggs. 

May 12, 2012 at Sourland Mountain Preserve
Photo 11329893, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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