I may have mentioned Penny before.
Friends for years. Engaged for nearly two. Colleagues for almost three. Between us we've worked with somewhere approaching 300 species, but long before PRO Herpetology, magazine articles or white papers, there were corn snakes.
When we first met almost ten years ago, Penny was breeding them.
Pantherophis guttatus—the North American corn snake—is one of the world's most recognisable reptiles. Their common name is thought to come from the distinctive chequered pattern on the underside of the body, resembling maize kernels, as well as their habit of hunting rodents around corn stores and grain silos throughout their native range.
Penny has always had a fascination with them. She bred them then, and she still breeds them now. The only difference is that these days she's surrounded by some truly spectacular animals.
We've never really been morph people.
Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate a beautiful palmetto or a striking tessera as much as anyone else, but for us the colour has always come second to the snake wearing it. Temperament, behaviour and individual character have always been far more interesting than whether one happens to be orange, yellow, patternless or carrying a particularly fashionable gene.
These days, however, part of our snake room looks suspiciously like somebody spilled a rainbow.
And among all those beautiful corn snakes are two girls who have taught me more about behaviour than any textbook ever has.
Daisy.
And...
Dipshit.
What's in a Name?
Let's start with Daisy.
A beautiful 4-year-old amelanistic female who, to the best of my knowledge, has never—ever—missed a meal. She doesn't bite. She doesn't musk. She handles beautifully and seems to genuinely enjoy exploring outside her 4×2×2-foot vivarium before calmly returning home as though she's been on a pleasant afternoon stroll.
In short...
Daisy is exactly what most people imagine a corn snake should be.
Then there's Dipshit.
Again, a beautiful snake. Classic wild-type colours and patterning, strong, robust and, physically at least, built exactly as nature intended. I originally took the then two-year-old Dipshit into rescue, nursed her back to full health and eventually passed her on to Penny to become part of her breeding group.
And breed she did.
To date she's produced dozens of healthy, energetic youngsters.
She is also, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the least intellectually gifted snakes I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.
Dipshit gets stuck.
Regularly.
She tries to eat absolutely anything if she catches the faintest hint of food. She escapes and gets stuck. She tries to escape... and gets stuck. In fairness, perhaps Dipstuck would have been the more accurate name.
Double Trouble?
Penny kept her corn snakes exactly as I kept mine: individually, in spacious enclosures with plenty of opportunities to climb, burrow, explore and behave like corn snakes. We both believed that if an animal evolved to perform a behaviour, good husbandry should at least give it the opportunity to do so.
See why we get on so well?
Then life threw a rather large, corn snake-shaped spanner into the works.
Penny was contacted by someone who, and I quote, "can't look after these stupid things anymore," at almost exactly the same time I was dealing with a rescue involving my own little knot of corn snakes. Between us we suddenly had more animals than available vivariums.
I couldn't lend Penny an enclosure.
She couldn't lend me one.
After several hours of discussion, we reached a conclusion neither of us particularly liked.
The smaller snakes would have to be housed temporarily in RUBs.
Some of the larger adults...
We would have to figure that out as we went.
I got my end sorted fairly quickly and rushed over to Penny's to help tackle the chaos.
Penny being Penny, she'd already finished.
Boxes were stacked, snakes were settled and the temporary shuffle had gone surprisingly smoothly. Well... almost.
There was just one problem.
Dipshit.
Dippy had somehow managed to end up homeless. Every available vivarium was occupied, every RUB had a resident, and she was the odd snake out.
Which left us with a dilemma.
What exactly do you do with one exceptionally accident-prone corn snake when you've run out of accommodation?
The answer seemed obvious to me.
Penny wasn't quite so convinced.
After a fair amount of persuasion—and to be fair, persuasion is how I ended up with her—I eventually convinced her to let Dippy move in with Daisy. Just temporarily. I promised I'd sit and watch them for an hour or so to make sure there was no aggression, no stress and, ideally, no accidental attempts at swallowing one another.
What could possibly go wrong?
Friends?
There was a definite moment of trepidation—and, if I'm being honest, there still is—when we introduced two adult corn snakes that, according to almost every piece of husbandry literature available, should never have been sharing an enclosure.
Corn snakes have been described as solitary animals for decades. Pick up almost any care guide, browse the RSPCA website, read veterinary advice or spend five minutes on an online reptile forum and you'll find the same message repeated: corn snakes are solitary in the wild and should therefore be housed alone in captivity.
It's sensible advice, and for the vast majority of situations I still think it's the right advice.
But...
It also left me with a handful of questions that nobody seemed to be asking.
What actually happens when two unrelated adult female corn snakes meet in the wild?
If they're drawn to the same water source, what then? If both discover an abundance of prey around a grain store or an old barn, do they immediately leave? Ignore one another? Compete? Avoid each other altogether? Or is the answer, as is so often the case in biology...
"It depends."
More importantly, how much of that behaviour changes when food, water, shelter and predation are removed from the equation?
Without really intending to...
We'd stumbled into a social experiment.
Twist and Shout
When Dippy was introduced into Daisy's spacious vivarium, she immediately did exactly what I'd expected.
Absolute chaos.
She disappeared beneath the décor, climbed everything she could reach, buried herself in the substrate, investigated every hide she could find and, for reasons known only to Dipshit herself, launched into the water bowl for good measure.
Daisy, on the other hand, did almost nothing.
She simply watched.
Once Dippy's initial "Arghhhh!" moment had subsided, Daisy calmly wandered over to inspect her new housemate. What followed immediately caught my attention. Both snakes began excessive tongue-flicking, gently nudging one another and displaying repeated body twitching. None of it appeared defensive. Neither animal attempted to flee and there wasn't the slightest hint of aggression.
That intrigued me.
Body twitching in corn snakes is generally associated with courtship, stress or frustration. Yet neither female was in breeding condition, neither appeared stressed and there was certainly little evidence of frustration. Instead, they simply seemed... curious.
Dippy would disappear into a hide.
Daisy would quietly follow.
Daisy would investigate the now thoroughly rearranged water bowl.
Dippy would join her.
For more than an hour I sat watching the pair of them, completely absorbed by what I was seeing.
Eventually they settled down together inside the largest hide in the middle of the enclosure. Penny refilled the water bowl, restored some order after the Dipshit-induced interior redesign, and I headed home.
Then and Now
Fast forward six years.
Penny and I are now engaged. We live together, we work together and, through PRO Herpetology, we've somehow managed to turn a shared passion into a shared purpose.
And Daisy and Dipshit?
They're still together.
They remain two of Penny's favourite breeding females. Daisy is still the gentle, endlessly curious snake she's always been. Dipshit is still... well... Dipshit. She still gets herself stuck, still manages to tie herself in knots—yes, she genuinely did that, twice—and still approaches life with all the careful planning of a shopping trolley with three wheels.
Both feed exceptionally well. Both bask. Both utilise their UV. Both breed successfully. In every measurable sense, they're thriving.
But the behaviour that first caught my attention never disappeared.
They still follow one another around the enclosure. If one moves to a different hide, the other usually follows. If Daisy investigates a new branch or settles beneath the basking lamp, Dippy often isn't far behind. Whether they're chasing the same thermal gradient, the same humidity, or simply making similar choices at the same time, I honestly don't know.
What I do know is that, after six years, it certainly isn't what I expected to see.
So...
Am I saying corn snakes are social animals?
Absolutely not.
Am I saying they're strictly solitary?
Again...
No.
What I am saying is this.
The more time I spend watching reptiles, the less interested I become in telling people what they are supposed to do.
Somewhere between the care sheets, the scientific papers and thousands of hours of quiet observation, I've come to suspect that corn snake behaviour—like that of so many other reptiles—is considerably more complex than we've given it credit for.
I'd rather watch what they actually choose to do.
Add comment
Comments