Regina septemvittata
(Say, 1825)
Montgomery Co., Indiana. April 8th, 1996.
Rick Milas took me to a gravel-bottomed creek one chilly day in April. “There are queen snakes here,” he said. The low temperature led me to doubt, yet eventually, we did find one under a flat stone a dozen feet or so from the water. It was covered with mud, having emerged recently from its underground hibernaculum. The queen snake has a very small niche – it only eats crayfish, and of crayfish, it only eats those that have just shed their shells and are still soft-bodied. Its place in this world in perilous – fill a creek with toxins or silt, and the crayfish disappear, taking the queen snakes with them.
For more on queen snakes, see my Who Made The Queen Snake Queen? blog post. For even more, see my In Search Of The Queen blog post.
My Flickr album for this species is here.
HerpMapper records for this species are here.
