Galápagos Racers: answers to your questions about the BBC Planet Earth II iguana chase scene

This post will soon become available in Spanish

Galápagos Racers (Pseudalsophis occidentalis)
on Fernandina Island, from the BBC's Planet Earth II footage

If you haven't seen the incredible footage of the "iguana chase scene" from the BBC's Planet Earth II Islands episode, I encourage you to watch it right away. In addition to being a highly dramatic cinematographic masterpiece, it raises a number of interesting questions about the biology of the snakes in the clip. For a few days after it aired, the Internet was buzzing with these questions, and I've cataloged the answers to some of the most popular ones below. If you have one that isn't listed, feel free to ask it in the comments! And, if you want to know more about the process I used to dig up some of this information, check out my tutorial for teaching oneself about obscure snakes.

What kind of snakes are they?

Throughout the clip, Attenborough calls them "racer snakes"¹, but herpetologists would normally call the snakes on the screen Galápagos Racers. Although these snakes are called "racers", they're not closely related to North American racers (genus Coluber); it's been about 45 million years since these two snakes last shared a common ancestor.

Galápagos Racers belong to the genus Pseudalsophis. Depending on which sources you consult, there are between 4 and 7 species of Pseudalsophis in the Galápagos, as well as one in mainland South America.

Pseudalsophis slevini eating a gecko on Pinzón Island

Just like Galápagos tortoises, finches, and many other organisms, there are different species of Galápagos Racers on the different Galápagos Islands (one of the concepts that sparked Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection). The film was made on Fernandina, the youngest, westernmost, and most volcanically-active island in the Galápagos. Fernandina has two species of snakes, Pseudalsophis slevini and Pseudalsophis occidentalis. The snakes in the film must be Pseudalsophis occidentalis, because they are too large and not boldly banded enough to be P. slevini. You can read the original descriptions of both species here.

None of the sources reporting which species is shown in the film are authoritative, but without exception when the species is given it is given as Pseudalsophis biserialis. This is not correct under any modern taxonomy, although there is also a good explanation for why it is mistakenly being used—P. occidentalis was briefly a subspecies of P. biserialis, but has mostly been and is now treated either as a subspecies of P. dorsalis or as its own species. See below for much more (probably too much) detail.

Why are there so many of them?

Galápagos Racer (P. dorsalis) among adult Marine Iguanas
on Santa Cruz, which are much too large for it to eat

Most snakes are not social, and because they must swallow their food whole they cannot share prey. These snakes are not found at such high densities year-round, but rather aggregate around consistent Marine Iguana nesting sites in May when the eggs are hatching.

Just as when baby sea turtles emerge from their nests, predators congregate at the temporary buffet, returning afterwards to their usual densities. Around the world, there are numerous examples of avian and snake predators exploiting emerging hatchling iguanas. Researchers working at other iguana nesting sites in the Bahamas, the West Indies, and Venezuela have hypothesized that snakes and other predators also converge on the nesting sites of these other iguanas to exploit the temporary food source. Another example of snakes congregating around abundant prey resources is that of Puerto Rican and Cuban boas, which aggregate around the openings of massive bat caves.

The rest of the year, Galápagos Racers eat lava lizards, geckos, insects, marine fishes, and hatchling birds, as well as introduced rats and mice.

Are they really hunting in a pack?

Almost certainly not. Again, most snakes are not social, and because they must swallow their food whole they cannot share prey. Pack-hunting behavior is unknown in snakes.

Two P. occidentalis trying to eat the same iguana
Jaw-walking is a fixed action pattern in snakes and they
may eat things that only vaguely resemble their food
once they start jaw-walking them.
From Planet Earth II Behind the Scenes

Some species have surprisingly social behaviors. It would be really interesting to examine social behavior in these snakes. To my knowledge no one has done so. Although they obviously cannot share a single food item, but if they are foraging in the same time and place on a limited resource, there might be an opportunity for the evolution of social cues. At least one paper suggested that this might be the case with a pit viper. Even though the BBC videographers saw snakes actively fighting over the same prey items and in some cases eating one another, it's possible that more closely-related snakes are less likely to fight over food or eat one another, or that males are less likely to compete with or try to eat females. These are testable hypotheses. However, these are not well-studied snakes. I don't think they are helping each other, but there's a lot that we don't know about snakes. Some snakes exhibit dominance hierarchies, and one study suggested that individual recognition occurs and persists over time in gartersnakes.

Few scientists are currently studying these snakes. It's a testament to the BBC that they are consistently able to film natural phenomena that are still unknown to science. Hopefully this tape will stimulate some research on this exact question, and on the ecology of Galápagos Racers. When I wrote about Galápagos Racers in 2013, not much was known about their ecology, and that's still the case. It's amazing that so little research has been done on these snakes, particularly in contrast to Galápagos tortoises and marine iguanas (not to mention finches and other non-avian reptiles).

Why don't the female Marine Iguanas just lay their eggs somewhere else, closer to the ocean maybe?

Fates of rock iguana hatchlings, over half of which were
eaten by Cubophis and Epicrates snake predators in their
first month of life. From Knapp et al. 2010

Marine Iguanas have to dig nests and lay their eggs in soft sand, away from the rocky, tidal foraging grounds of the adults. They choose protected lava reefs for this purpose, which are in short supply on most islands. One estimate suggested that the cost of migrating to their nesting sites represented half the reproductive effort of female Galápagos land iguanas.

Many species of reptiles nest in areas where they otherwise do not spend much time, especially aquatic species (reptile eggs need to "breathe" air and cannot be laid underwater). Female Marine Iguanas may all use the same nesting sites because those are the only sites available, or they may choose to nest near one another because, just like with sea turtles, synchronous hatching of the young increases their probability of survival.

In a study of Bahamian rock iguanas (Cyclura cychlura), snake predation was the most likely cause of mortality for newborn iguanas dispersing away from their nests. They estimated that about 20-30% of hatchling iguanas survived their first month, and those that moved quickly and linearly away from their nests were the most likely to survive, perhaps because predators had learned to hang around the nesting area. Another study of Galápagos land iguanas showed that predation attempts by Galápagos hawks were more than three times as likely to be successful when the body temperature of the iguana hatchlings was below 90°F. And, baby Galápagos marine iguanas that hung around their hatching area had about a 10% lower survival rate than those that moved to the coast, which the researchers attribute mostly to higher risk of predation at the nesting area.

Studies on the population biology of Marine Iguanas have shown that most of their mortality is caused by "predation, starvation (sometimes as a result of being trapped by a rock), crushing by a rock, being beaten against rocks by the sea, and suffocation in collapsed nest burrows. Animals may also die after being swept out to sea by offshore currents". So, actually, predation may be the best way for them to go. Besides Galápagos Racers, their other predators include Galápagos Hawks, Short-eared Owls, crabs, and Giant Hawk-fish.

Are they venomous/dangerous to humans?

No. Like many snakes, Galápagos Racers are rear-fanged. This means that, although technically they are venomous, they don't pose a danger to humans. Rear-fanged snakes mostly have grooved teeth (rather than hollow fangs) on the back of their upper jaw (as opposed to the front); they can use these teeth to get venom into their prey once they are biting it, but they cannot strike out and deliver venom the way a viper can. A small minority of rear-fanged snakes have delivered medically-significant bites to humans, but almost all of these take place in a captive setting. You can read more about the different types of snake fangs here.

I didn't know there were snakes in the Galápagos. How did they get there?

Map showing the estimated age of each of the
Galápagos Islands. From Ali & Aitchison 2014

Galápagos Racers colonized the Galápagos Islands from mainland South America, just like all of the other Galápagos fauna and flora. The modern Galápagos Islands formed from volcanoes over the past 4 to 5 million years, although some of them have been building beneath the ocean surface for up to 15 million years. It is thought that there have been islands in the Galápagos for at least 8 million years, but the oldest islands have eroded and are now back beneath the ocean surface.

Because the Galápagos Islands are located only six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador, it is easier for them to be colonized by plants and animals from the mainland than for a more remote island chain such as Hawaii (which is >2,500 miles away from the nearest snake-inhabited landmass).

Molecular dating of the divergence time between Galápagos Racers and their closest mainland relative, Pseudalsophis elegans, suggests that it has been about 15 million years since they last shared a common ancestor. This suggests that the mainland ancestor of Galápagos Racers probably went extinct sometime over the last 15 million years, and that the ancestors of Galápagos Racers probably colonized the Galápagos Islands before any of the current islands existed (as is also the case for the Marine Iguanas). Until genetic work is done, we won't know how many times snakes colonized the Galápagos archipelago or how many distinct lineages there are. [Edit 12/30/2016: I have recently learned that Massey University ecologist Luis Ortiz-Catedral and his colleagues are working to understand the evolution of all the species in the genus Pseudalsophis and definitively answer this question.]

Could the film have been staged?

Obviously the scenes are spliced together, but in my opinion there's no chance the Galápagos National Park would allow something like this to be staged. They are among the strictest places in the world for researchers to conduct scientific work. However, more recent episodes of Planet Earth II have been criticized for incorporating fake sound effects.

I want more detail on the complicated taxonomic history of these snakes (said almost no one ever).

One of the few phylogenies to include Galápagos Racers

From Pyron et al. 2013

Broadly, Pseudalsophis is nested within a large clade of Caribbean, Central, and South American xenodontine snakes including, among numerous others, the genus Alsophis, which once contained Galápagos Racers and after which their current genus is named. They have been in a variety of genera since their description, especially Dromicus, which is no longer in use, from 1876 to 1997.

In 1973, herpetologist Charles Myers wrote: "The classification of colubrid snakes in general, and of South American colubrids in particular, is in a notoriously unsatisfactory state." Unfortunately, we are not that much better off today when it comes to Galápagos Racers. It seems pretty clear that the nearest relative of P. biserialis, P. dorsalis, and P. occidentalis is Pseudalsophis elegans, the only species in the genus found on the mainland (in Ecuador, Peru, and extreme northern Chile). Beyond that, there isn't a lot of clarity about their next-closest relatives. They are possibly most closely related to obscure South American "groundsnakes" in the genus Psomophis, or to the even more obscure genus Saphenophis, which was described by Myers as "quite lacking in peculiar or unique features" and so named "in allusion to one incontrovertible fact about these snakes...from the Greek saphenes (evident truth, clear) + ophis (a serpent), meaning 'clearly a snake'". We don't really have a great hypothesis about how the different lineages of Galápagos Racers are related to one another, or even if they are all descended from a single common ancestor, because we only have DNA from one of them so far.

Hypothesized scenario for the evolution of Pseudalsophis snakes
So far, we have no DNA evidence that would support or refute this model
From Ali & Aitchison 2014

Two reviews based on morphology addressed this question in the late 1990s. The first (Thomas 1997) focused exclusively on Galápagos Racers and suggested that P. biserialis, P. dorsalis, and P. occidentalis are descended from a shared common ancestor with P. elegans, but that P. hoodensis is more closely related to the mainland species Philodryas chammissonis, and that P. slevini and P. steindachneri are most closely related to Caribbean species. The other study (Zaher 1999), which looked at hemipene morphology over a much larger group of snakes, disagreed, finding a shared derived character—an inflated papillate ridge, placed far medially, on the medial surface of the lobes—linking the Galápagos Racers together with the mainland species P. elegans. Statements that Galápagos Racers have “very similar hemipenes” notwithstanding, Zaher was criticized for not describing the specific characters uniting the Galápagos species to the exclusion of others.

Maglio (1970) noted that the tooth counts and arrangement and the and shape of the premaxilla bone was most similar among the three Galápagos species that he examined (P. biserialis, P. dorsalis, and P. slevini), and different from the West Indian species that Taylor later suggested are P. slevini's closest relatives. More recently, a study led by Grazziotin claimed that they "unequivocally support...Zaher's (1999) hypothesis based on morphology that continental Pseudalsophis elegans is closely related to the Galápagos Island species of Xenodontinae (herein represented by Pseudalsophis dorsalis), rather than to West Indian Alsophis and Antillophis, and mainland Philodryas (Thomas, 1997)." However, they obviously didn't read Thomas's paper very carefully, because he also hypothesizes that P. dorsalis is closely related to P. elegans, and the Grazziotin paper didn't sequence any DNA from P. slevini, P. steindachneri, or P. hoodensis, and therefore didn't test any hypotheses about them.

As for whether or not the snakes in Planet Earth II should be called P. occidentalis or P. dorsalis occidentalis, that's really a lumper/splitter question. But, both the IUCN and the 2014 edition of Snakes of the World recognize P. occidentalis as a full species; it was originally described as such by Van Denburgh in 1912, sunk to a subspecies of P. dorsalis by Mertens in 1960, and re-elevated to a full species in a 1999 paper by Zaher that was not primarily concerned with taxonomy and appears to have subsequently been neglected. The Reptile Database is currently a holdout for the subspecies designation, which has not been disputed but which is also not explicitly supported by unambiguous data. Perhaps wisely, the official webpage of Galápagos National Park chooses not to use scientific names and refers to the Fernandina racers as the "western subspecies". The truth is that, until more research is done, we won't be able to settle on an accurate taxonomy for these snakes.

---

1 This sounds a bit redundant to a snake biologist, but it isn't incorrect. The one thing that I wish BBC programs would do is identify the species in them more precisely. I'm advocating for a "biologist mode" that can be activated which would show the location and identity of species in all clips, similar to the old MTV show Pop-up Video.^↩

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Andy Kraemer and Jim Moulton for the use of their photographs.

REFERENCES

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Bisconti, M., W. Landini, G. Bianucci, G. Cantalamessa, G. Carnevale, L. Ragaini, and G. Valleri. 2001. Biogeographic relationships of the Galapagos terrestrial biota: parsimony analyses of endemicity based on reptiles, land birds and Scalesia land plants. Journal of Biogeography 28:495-510 <full-text>

Carpenter, C. C. 1966. The marine iguana of the Galapagos Islands, its behavior and ecology. Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences (Series 4) 34:329-376 <full-text>

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Life is Short, but Snakes are Long by Andrew M. Durso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Are there any countries without snakes?

Click here to read this post in Spanish
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Global distribution of all snake species combined
Public domain from Wikipedia
Terrestrial data from Ernst & Ernst (2011) and Cogger et al. (1998)
Sea snake data based on Campbell & Lamar (2004), Phillips (2002),
Ernst & Ernst (2011), and Spawls & Branch (1995)

Snakes are found in almost every country in the world, but there are a few places without wild¹ snakes. Snake-free land generally falls into two categories: remote islands, mostly formed by volcanism or as atolls, that have never been part of a continental land mass and/or have been isolated from continents for a long time, and continental areas that are or were covered by ice within the last 26,000 years and haven't been recolonized since (for example, there are snake fossils from northern Canada, where no snakes live now, from a time when it was much warmer). There are also snake-free parts of the oceans, and probably there are some urban areas that are so disturbed that no snakes live there any more (e.g., downtown Manhattan), although they once did.

Iceland

Iceland is a volcanic archipelago just outside the Arctic Circle. Despite its high latitude, Iceland is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate, so snakes might actually do fairly well there, especially if they could take advantage of its plentiful geothermal features, as the high-altitude hot-spring snakes of Tibet (genus Thermophis) have done. However, Iceland has never been connected to any continent—instead, it was formed about 20 million years ago by a series of volcanic eruptions in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which separates the Eurasian and North American plates. It's been at about its current latitude the entire time, and, as far as anyone knows, has never been colonized by snakes. Today, the closest snakes are adders (Vipera berus) in both Scotland (470 mi away) and Norway (600 mi away), both of which are separated by a great deal of very cold ocean.

Ireland

Unlike Iceland, Ireland was once connected to other land masses. Parts of it are at least 1.7 billion years old. At the end of the Precambrian, two pieces of rock that would become Ireland could be found beneath the sea, one piece connected to the continent of Laurentia and the other piece to the smaller continent of Avalonia, both around 80° South. Over the next 50 million years, these two parts drifted northward, eventually uniting and breaking sea level near the equator about 440 million years ago, in the Silurian Period. Throughout the late Paleozoic Era, Ireland sank back under the sea and gained 65% of its modern mass as limestone deposits from huge coral reefs. At the beginning of the Mesozoic, Ireland was at the latitude of present-day Egypt and had a desert climate, and by the time snakes evolved (150 million years ago, in the late Jurassic-early Cretaceous) Ireland had separated from any other land mass, and has been connected on and off to this day. There is some debate over how recently a land bridge connected Ireland with Great Britain and, by extension, mainland Europe, with the consensus resting on the idea that Ireland was isolated by ocean by 16,000 years ago, at which time the climate was still quite cold and there was a lot more ice in Ireland than there is now. Although it's not insane to think that snakes might have colonized Ireland from Europe sometime during the 90 million years that preceded the Pleistocene Ice Ages, as they have since re-colonized Great Britain, so far no one has found any snake fossils in Ireland. But, viviparous lizards, natterjack toads, and common frogs have managed to make it to Ireland, and the slowworm has been introduced there, so it could happen one day. Likely successful colonists include adders (Vipera berus), grass snakes (Natrix natrix), or smooth snakes (Coronella austriaca) from Great Britain, France, or Scandinavia. The Irish climate is highly moderated by the gulf stream, with much milder winters than expected for such a northerly area, so snakes could do quite well there.

Cape Verde

Cape Verde is an island country consisting of 10 volcanic islands in the central Atlantic Ocean, 350 miles off the coast of the western African countries of Mauritania and Senegal. The Cape Verde Islands were all formed by the same volcanic hot spot, the oldest 26 million years ago and the youngest just 100,000 years ago. They have never been colonized by snakes from mainland Africa. There is a single reference to the Striped Sand Snake (Psammophis sibilans) on the island of Sal in a 1951 paper that, according to the authors, was an accidental introduction from Guinea-Bissau. Neither this snake nor any other has ever been recorded again from Cape Verde, although the archipelago is home to 31 endemic lizard species, more than any other island chain in the Macaronesian region.

New Zealand

New Zealand was part of Gondwana (aka Gondwanaland), the more southerly of the two supercontinents formed by the breakup of Pangaea 200-180 million years ago. Gondwana comprised the present-day continents of South America, Africa, Australia, India, and Antarctica as well as New Zealand. Today, New Zealand is the highest part of a mostly-submerged continent called Zealandia that broke away from Gondwana between 100 and 80 million years ago. Since that time, New Zealand has developed a unique flora and fauna that does not include any terrestrial snakes, which makes sense since it has been isolated since around the dawn of their evolution (and has been mostly submerged several times since). However, a steady trickle of reports of sea snakes, borne by oceanic currents beyond their normal range to New Zealand waters and beaches, was summarized in 1997, at which time an amazing 69 records of 2 species were known, dating back to 1837 (more records and a third species have been added since). About 90% are of pelagic sea snakes (Hydrophis platurus; formerly Pelamis platurus, also known as yellow-bellied sea snakes), a very widespread species that is infamous for vagrancy and recently made headlines when one washed ashore in Ventura County, California. The remaining 10% of records are of banded sea snakes (Laticauda colubrina), a species that normally sticks more closely to shores, and judging by their morphology most of these have likely come to New Zealand from Fiji or Tonga. In 1995, one specimen in the British Museum collected in New Zealand in 1925 and formerly classified as L. colubrina was re-identified as a new species from New Caledonia, L. saintgironsi, by herpetologists revising the widespread Laticauda colubrina complex.

Map of pelagic sea snake records from New Zealand
(1837-1997)
From Gill 1997

High sea surface temperatures in 1969-1975 and again in 1988-1990 coincided with major influxes of tropical and subtropical fishes, sea turtles, and sea snakes (up to 16 a year) carried to New Zealand waters by the East Australian Current. Most records are of single animals, but in March 1985 four H. platurus were found on Tokerau Beach in Northland. About three-quarters of sea snake records are from Austral autumn (March-May), and many are from the north coast of the north island, but H. platurus has been found all around the North Island, including in the Cook Strait, and once even on the north coast of the South Island (at Pakawau, Golden Bay, in March 1974)! All L. colubrina records are from the north-east coast of the North Island, except for one at Castlepoint, Wairarapa, in August 1977. All records are of adult snakes, and most (79%) were alive when found, usually washed ashore, but occasionally swimming freely. One even swam up a stream near the sea! Even more amazingly, several sea snakes have been found alive inland from the coast, including a May 1938 record of H. platurus "some distance" from the sea at Table Cape on the Mahia Peninsula, a January 1990 record of L. colubrina "well above" the high-tide line at Whangaruru Harbour, an April 1938 record of H. platurus 200 feet from the sea on a lawn at New Plymouth, and, most incredible, a September 1945 record of L. colubrina alive at Te Aroha, near Hamilton, which is over 12 miles from an estuary over a range of hills or over 27 miles from the ocean along the Waihou River. Unlike H. platurus, which is almost incapable of moving on land, L. colubrina is reasonably good at terrestrial locomotion, which could explain the inland presence of these snakes. Alternatively, the author of the review paper suggested that the snakes could have been carried inland by birds.²

New Zealand also owns the Chatham Islands 560 miles to the east, the Kermadec Islands 620 miles to the north, and Tokelau 2000 miles to the northeast³, but no sea snakes have been reported from these islands, probably because so few people live there. Like vagrant birds, even the records from mainland New Zealand surely represent just a small percentage of the total number of marine reptiles that have reached New Zealand over the years. However, New Zealand is still widely considered to have no native snakes, since H. platurus  stop feeding at sea temperatures below 18°C and die at temperatures between 14.5 and 17°C (the average sea temperature in the coldest month in northern New Zealand is 16°C).

Kiribati

Kiribati is a Pacific Island nation that straddles the region of the central Pacific Ocean where the Equator and the International Date Line cross, making it the only country that is in all four hemispheres. It consists of four island groups totaling 32 atolls and one coral island. Of these, approximately the eastern half (the Phoenix and Line Islands) are apparently devoid of snakes; at least, they are listed as having no snakes in the most up-to-date and authoritative guide to the reptiles of the Pacific Islands. This guide takes a conservative approach in listing only species that are confirmed by a museum specimen or literature record, so it's possible that at least pelagic sea snakes are found in the waters of eastern Kiribati. What is certain is that the western half of Kiribati (Banaba and the Gilbert Islands) is home to breeding populations of banded sea snakes (Laticauda colubrina), and possibly pelagic sea snakes as well. Additionally, there is a single record of an ornate reef seasnake (Hydrophis ornatus), a species that is normally found much farther west, from the Gilbert Islands. This might represent a vagrant, but more likely it is a misidentified or mislabeled specimen. So, Kiribati has no terrestrial snakes, unless you count banded sea snakes, which mate, lay eggs, and sometimes digest food on land, but hunt, catch prey, and spend much of their time in the ocean.

Tuvalu

Tuvalu is a Pacific Island nation south of Kiribati comprising three reef islands and six atolls and totaling 10 square miles, making it the fourth smallest country in the world. Like Kiribati, Tuvalu has no terrestrial snakes unless you count L. colubrina, but unlike Kiribati it has literature records of pelagic sea snakes off its shores. Happily, Tuvalu has decided to honor this species by putting it on one of its coins! It's a commemorative coin rather than a coin that's actually part of normal circulation, but still, it's pretty cool to have a snake on your money. Tuvalu is also home to at least 9 species of lizards and the introduced cane toad, so it's possible that snakes could show up there one day. In fact, it's even possible that a native, endemic blindsnake could have escaped detection on Tuvalu (or any other Pacific island) to this day. The only reason the Federated States of Micronesia aren't on this list is because of two unexpected species of endemic blindsnakes, Ramphotyphlops adocetus and R. hatmaliyeb, described in 2012 from two small islands, one in the eastern part of FSM and the other in the western part.

Nauru

Nauru is a relatively isolated Pacific Island nation and is one of the only countries smaller than Tuvalu (at 8.1 square miles, only Monaco and Vatican City, both in Europe, are smaller). Unlike many Pacific Island nations, Nauru is a single island. Nauru has no native terrestrial snakes, but it does have H. platurus off its shores, and it also has what is likely an introduced species, the ubiquitous Indotyphlops braminus or Brahminy Blindsnake, the only unisexual species of snake. It's actually amazing to me that we're on the seventh entry and haven't encountered this species yet, considering how widespread it is globally. The original native range of I. braminus is unknown, but it probably evolved in continental Asia. Because a single individual constitutes a reproductively-competent population, it has since spread all over the world, and it's unclear how long it has been established on Nauru or elsewhere in the Pacific. Many similarly-widespread species in the Pacific owe their distribution to human-assisted transport, the precise timeline of which is difficult to determine. Given the harm done to Nauru's environment by phosphate mining during the 20th century, it's unlikely that any native terrestrial snake would have survived.

Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands (see above map) have close political ties with the USA, but they are self-governing. They are located north of Kiribati, west of the FSM, and south of Wake Island. The authoritative guide to the reptiles of the Pacific Islands lists only I. braminus from the Marshall Islands, but other sources suggest that at least a few brown treesnakes (Boiga irregularis), infamously introduced to Guam, have been found there as well, and it's possible that H. platurus and possibly other sea snakes are found off its shores. Both the Gilbert Islands in Kiribati to the south and Pohnpei and Kosrae in FSM to the west have L. colubrina, although an official page states that the Marshall Islands have no sea snakes. So, as far as we know the Marshall Islands have no snakes that are native and terrestrial (unless you count I. braminus as native, considering that we don't know how long it's been there).

Vatican City

The Vatican is a walled enclave within the city of Rome, Italy, with an area of 110 acres and a population of 842, making it the smallest internationally-recognized independent state in the world, both by area and population. I couldn't find any references confirming or denying the presence of wild snakes in the Vatican, but other wildlife seem to be pretty minimal, which makes sense considering that Rome has been a large city for thousands of years. But, snakes and other wildlife can hang on in some amazingly urbanized places, so I wouldn't completely rule out the presence of a few of the eight species of snakes that can surely be found in the surrounding Italian countryside. Monaco, another European microstate with a very dense population and a high degree of urbanization, is another possibility for a snake-less nation, although, given Monaco's reputation as a playground for the rich and famous (30% percent of its population are millionaires), there are certainly some who meet an alternate definition of the word "snake" within its walls.

Cover of a joke book that's blank inside

So there you have it: a maximum of ten countries out of 196 "without snakes", depending on where you want to draw the line. If we start expanding into territories or disjunct sections of larger countries, the list grows considerably, including places like Greenland, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda, Hawaii⁴, Wake Island, Johnston Atoll, Howland & Baker Islands, the Marquesas Islands, the Pitcairn Islands, Sala y Gomez, Isla Malpelo, St. Helena, the Faroe Islands, the Isle of Man, many Arctic and Antarctic islands, and Antarctica itself, which is owned by no country. And of course, as you can see from the map at the top, there are also large mainland areas of northern Europe, Asia, and North America, as well as the southern tip of Patagonia, that are too cold for snakes (although Vipera berus gets above the Arctic Circle in Scandinavia), not to mention the Atlantic, Arctic, and Antarctic Oceans⁵.

In the course of the research I did for this post, I found many travel articles promoting the snakelessness of some of these places as overwhelmingly positive, as I'm sure it is for many ophidiophobic travelers. But, the risk that snakes pose is way, way smaller than the fear we have of them, and in my mind the real danger is that many people see eradication of snakes as a positive thing, despite the fact that many of them are in real danger of extinction. Mauritius barely made it off this list, with one of two native species extinct and the other hanging on thanks only to captive breeding and reintroduction efforts. St. Kitts & Nevis could lose its only native snake, the Saba or orange-bellied Racer (Alsophis rufiventris), and native snakes have gone extinct or become critically endangered on many other islands throughout the Pacific and Caribbean due to centuries of forest clearance, overgrazing, development, and the introduction of invasive species, not to mention the many continental snake species threatened by sprawling development and habitat fragmentation. So, please, let's keep this list from growing.

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1 Given the growing popularity of herpetoculture, I'd be willing to bet that there are captive snakes in every country, although a few countries have stringent laws banning any captive snakes, including as pets as well as in zoos and research facilities.^↩

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2 Studies have shown that, although many Pacific birds avoid pelagic sea snakes, naive Atlantic birds will try eat them (only to throw them up, since they are apparently poisonous as well as venomous). New Zealand's birds might be sufficiently naive to try to eat one.^↩

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3 Zug's Reptiles and Amphibians of the Pacific Islands lists Tokelau as having no snakes, not even sea snakes, but does not cover the Chatham or Kermadec Islands.^↩

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4 Hawaii has introduced Brahminy Blindsnakes and, unlike many Pacific Islands, it is known that these colonized the island chain more recently, in 1930, when they were imported from the Philippines in potted palm trees. Hawaii also has pelagic sea snakes and there are a few records of introduced brown treesnakes and boa constrictors, but neither species has established a breeding population (yet).^↩

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5 A study evaluating the probability that pelagic sea snakes could enter the Caribbean and Atlantic through the Panama canal, as lionfish have, concluded that there were no real barriers to their colonization of the eastern side of the Americas, but so far this has not happened.^↩

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Kerry Nelson for doing some of the background research for this post as part of a discussion in the Wild Snakes: Education & Discussion Facebook group.

REFERENCES

Edwards, R. J., and A. J. Brooks. 2008. The Island of Ireland: Drowning the Myth of an Irish Land-bridge? Pages 19-34 in J. J. Davenport, D. P. Sleeman, and P. C. Woodman, editors. Mind the Gap: Postglacial Colonisation of Ireland. Special Supplement to The Irish Naturalists’ Journal <link>

Gill, B. J. 1997. Records of turtles and sea snakes in New Zealand, 1837-1996. New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research 31:477-486 <link>

Heatwole, H., S. Busack, and H. Cogger. 2005. Geographic variation in sea kraits of the Laticauda colubrina complex (Serpentes: Elapidae: Hydrophiinae: Laticaudini). Herpetological Monographs 19:1-136 <link>

Hecht, M. K., C. Kropach, and B. M. Hecht. 1974. Distribution of the yellow-bellied sea snake, Pelamis platurus, and its significance in relation to the fossil record. Herpetologica 30:387-396 <link>

McKeown, S. 1996. A Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians in the Hawaiian Islands. Diamond Head Publishing.

Vasconcelos, R., J. C. Brito, S. Carranza, and D. J. Harris. 2013. Review of the distribution and conservation status of the terrestrial reptiles of the Cape Verde Islands. Oryx 47:77-87 <link>

Wynn, A. H., R. P. Reynolds, D. W. Buden, M. Falanruw, and B. Lynch. 2012. The unexpected discovery of blind snakes (Serpentes: Typhlopidae) in Micronesia: two new species of Ramphotyphlops from the Caroline Islands. Zootaxa 3172:39–54 <link>

Zug, G. R. 2013. Reptiles and Amphibians of the Pacific Islands: A Comprehensive Guide. University of California Press, Berkeley, California, USA <link>

Life is Short, but Snakes are Long by Andrew M. Durso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.