Quote:
Originally Posted by Seahawk
In Maryland? The farm is along a marsh and then bordered by by woods. I am surrounded. The little mnemonic I learned about the coral snake is “red touch yellow, kill a fellow.”
What the **** does that mean!
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I'm in a couple of snake ID groups on facebook. That mnemonic is actually not a great way to go about things. It
mostly works, but there are
plenty of exceptions, apparently. Not only that, but it's super easy for folks to mentally transpose the mnemonic. There's also a lot of misinformation about snakes other than coral snakes, like pupil shape, head shape, etc... THe following link addresses many of the myths, but I'm specifically copy/pasting
some of the info about coral snakes.
https://medium.com/natural-world/how-not-to-id-a-venomous-snake-8c7de2d0ca2e
Quote:
Even though coralsnakes occur in many countries, the rhyme is only meant to apply in the United States.
The rhyme gets misremembered. One of the ways I have heard this is, “Red touches yellow’s a friendly fellow; Red touches black, you’d better get back.” A young woman got envenomated just a few months ago because she asked if a coralsnake was venomous on Facebook and someone said the rhyme wrong. If you are facing a snake that you think could hurt you and you get an adrenaline rush, how easy do you really think it will be to properly recite and decipher a rhyme that you may not have heard in years? In my opinion, you are better off memorizing what your local snakes look like so you don’t have to think about it.
The rhyme assumes that you are looking at a normally-colored snake. While most snakes do have a predictable appearance, aberrancies (oddly-colored individuals) are common enough that we see them regularly on the snake forums.
The rhyme presumes that you know how to interpret what it means more than what it says. For example, on the (normally-colored) Texas Coralsnake above, you can see that the black bleeds past the yellow bands. Consequently, the red is touching yellow and black. The rhyme is referring to the yellow in this instance, but that is not mentioned.
The rhyme presumes that you either live in an area without species that break this rule, or you already know which other snakes to exclude. Here’s a tidbit you might not have known: there are more harmless species (four) in the US alone that have red touching yellow than there are species of coralsnakes in the US (three). Let me say that again, in case it didn’t sink in.
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1 HARMLESS Sonoran Shovel-nosed Snake (US & Mexico), Chionactis palarostris, photo by COLEJWOLF
2 VENOMOUS Aquatic Coralsnake, Micrurus surinamensis (South America), photo by Bernard Dupont
3 VENOMOUS Bibron’s Coralsnake, Calliophis bibroni (India), photo by Prasenjeet Yadav
4 VENOMOUS Variable Coralsnake, Micrurus diastema (Mexico), photo by Luis Diaz-Gamboa
5 HARMLESS Long-nosed Snake, Rhinocheilus lecontei (USA), photo by Amy
6 VENOMOUS Texas Coralsnake (melanistic), Micrurus tener (USA), photo by Tyler Sladen