Corn Snake Facts

Video Transcript

"So this is a corn snake. A species very common through the southern United States from New Jersey south to Florida and Louisiana. It's also known as a red rat snake for its red coloring, though this particular individual is starting to show signs of preparing a new skin so it's getting ready to shed so that really brilliant red is actually kind of muted right now and you might even see that the eyes look a little cloudy, kind of opaque. The scale over the eyes is starting to prepare to come off as well. This species, elapha guttata is a woodland forest species, it's found in many habitats. And it gets its name actually from being seen often in corn fields or even around farms, corn cribs, and certainly not eating the corn, but looking for rodents that are looking for the corn. And so they are known to help farmers protect their crops. Some people think they get the name corn snake from the patterns the checkered patterns underneath which this individual doesn't show a lot of, but that would resemble Indian corn. So there are a couple of theories of whee they get that name, corn snake. This is also an egg laying species. It's a constrictor, and in the rat snake family. It mates generally in out of March through May and it lays clutches of up to thirty eggs. From May to July and then the hatchling occurs in late July to September after about a fifty to sixty day incubation period. As their names suggests, the red rat snake, they primarily eat rats and ice and other small mammals. But they will eat birds and occasionally amphibians."