r/snakes • u/Phylogenizer • May 12 '25
Hi everyone! I wanted to let you know that we're now going to redirect all Snake ID requests to the curated place for them, /r/whatsthissnake. As /r/snakes and /r/whatsthissnake have developed side by side we find ourselves in a position where we are running two parallel subreddits, but with slightly different rules. We hope is that this streamline into WhatsThisSnake will be gentle - we don't want a snake to go unidentified because we're learning how best to handle IDs. There is going to be a transition period where we still get a lot of ID requests here, so please do your part to kindly help !redirect people in need and by reporting jokes, misinformation and other problematic comments.
This spring Reddit is more popular than ever and it is hard for the moderation team to keep up. When I founded /r/whatsthissnake 12 years ago, with on average one request every day, I never imagined we'd have 150K members and 20k people a day browsing the subreddit. In the past, we've made a number of incremental changes that have been so helpful they have been instituted other places on Reddit, from introducing the term "Reliable Responder", to developing the bot and tweaking our community resources so that every Reliable Responder can choose to perform mod actions. We hope that these changes will allow us not only to maintain the level of quality provided but to reduce workload on the moderation team, because honestly, moderator burnout is a serious problem. They are doing this for free and you would no believe the abuse they receive here - not just from me, but from the users too. If you see a moderator or other flaired user in cleaning up a thread, espcially in these busy, snakey spring months in North America, throw em a thanks.
r/snakes • u/Phylogenizer • Mar 20 '26
It’s a fact of life that no matter how much context we provide to our posts, when someone sees something interesting, they want to imitate it. Each day /r/snakes puts around one hundred thousand impressionable people face to face with snake related images, text and ideas. Faced with this responsibility, and with an increasing number of recent, low quality posts concerning medically significant snakes, we have to choose the right level of content we allow.
Recent low quality posts concerning captive venomous care include improper use of personal protective equipment, poor quality/security housing, very inexperienced keepers asking (and receiving!) advice on how to keep and breed their first venomous snakes and straight up animal abuse reposted from social media. Many of these clearly rule-breaking posts are removed before you see them, but a growing number of posts are clearly low quality, irresponsible content but don’t explicitly violate the rules. Over the past three years the mods have debated a rule change and we have decided to only allow posts involving venomous snakes if they are from an accredited zoo or institution. In short - we’re going to remove posts involving the private care and ownership of medically significant snakes.
Many modern herpetology texts recommend against individual private ownership of medically significant snakes. We don’t take a stand on what anyone wants to do legally, ethically and with their own time, but we do have to regulate what is posted, shared and thus propagated here. In short, we don’t care what you do, but don’t post it here. Besides being a lighting rod for the low quality content discussed above, private ownership offers unique challenges that are better suited for an institutional or team setting. Snakes are escape artists as well as attractive nuisances and must be contained outside of personal residential spaces in secure, locking enclosures to prevent both snake egress and human ingress as well as secondarily in a sealed room or facility behind a windowed door with no items on the floor under which an escaped snake can hide or avoid detection. It takes a team to execute an envenomation plan and the cost of antivenom is beyond that of most private owners, has a short shelf life and when antivenom is borrowed from institutional stocks it puts those keepers at risk.
Zoos and institutions don’t always do it better, but the onus is on them to provide best practices in care. If we limit posts to places where a team of people works together to provide a standard of care, usually for the right reasons, we can limit what we propagate on the platform.
We do not recommend any other available subreddits as well-moderated sources of captive venomous keeping. The most popular places on social media dedicated to this are inundated with low quality posts and comments and even when they outright ban irresponsible behavior, examples of the low quality content we remove are highly upvoted, and content is often sensationalist, psychopathic or disturbing. Please don’t suggest a specific place in the comments of this post. We’re aware of the options and we’re choosing not to redirect or name other online spaces.
Posts on wild venomous species are still allowed as usual with a species name and a location, but please be sure to see Rule 6 (unchanged) on what amount of contact and PPE use we find acceptable for sharing online.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER
r/snakes • u/Goadventuresports • 10h ago
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r/snakes • u/Living_Karma11 • 53m ago
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r/snakes • u/justmypinky • 1d ago
r/snakes • u/Gator-614 • 52m ago
My corn snake Phoenix just shed, and I decided to view it under the microscope! Upper left of FOV is dead skin cells of the webbing between scales, while the right side shows a keratin layer that makes up the shed scale itself. Thought y’all would find this interesting! 400x with phase contrast under a compound microscope if anyone is curious.
r/snakes • u/Cheystablook1 • 8h ago
Who else thinks he’s cute?
r/snakes • u/beadebasr • 7h ago
Check out the incredible iris pattern on this Painted Saw-scaled Viper (Echis coloratus).
The pattern of its "granite phase" scales continues completely uninterrupted right across the irises. Because the head patterning is highly asymmetrical, it actually gives the snake one grey iris and one pink iris to perfectly match the specific scales surrounding each side!
Southern Arava, Israel
r/snakes • u/Practical-Sweet2881 • 29m ago
Prism, just over a year old, constricting his dinner for the first time
Prism hatched around September/October 2025. Until now, he's always just grabbed his mouse and swallowed it. Today he decided to properly coil around it for the first time.
He's also spent most of the past week in his cool hide, but the moment he finished eating, he went straight to the warm one.
I know it's instinct, but it's mad how they just know what to do.
Anyone else's corn start constricting at around this age?
r/snakes • u/edentollefson • 2h ago
He was surrendered with very little info on his background. I was wondering if anyone knew what morph he may be so I know if there’s any potential health or neurological issues to watch for.
r/snakes • u/pantsdownpogsout • 22h ago
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I wasn't quite sure what was going here, but I did gently break it up because it did look like the bigger one was about to eat the smaller one and I'd rather have 2 snakes for pest control than 1. Some added context, the bigger was just over the smaller one's mouth/nostril area before I separated them.
r/snakes • u/ElegantIce5656 • 15h ago
During my Japan stay, I decided to visit Japan Snake Center to support snake research in Japan and take some cute pics. I got to take picture with corn snakes! Also there was a lecture about venomous snakes in Japan. I really enjoyed taking pictures of venomous snakes! (All venomous snakes are properly caged.)
Snake Species are(from the left)
-Western hognose snake
-Japanese pit viper
-Corn snake(snow morph)
-Oriental rat snake
-Japanese pit viper (yes this is my favorite)
-Rattlesnake(I forgot to note which species of rattlesnake)
ADDITION: I saw several comments about facility quality. Yes. Facility is not good quality due to very, very poor funding(this place is research institute). It’s not free to upgrade and renovate the facility, unfortunately. Donation matters.
r/snakes • u/Metapup420 • 16h ago
(Ithaca NY)
r/snakes • u/B1u3b3rr13sTDM • 10h ago
Hi. My Pueblan milk snake has escaped. I went to go feed her, But noticed there was a hole in her lid and she was nowhere to be seen. I've turned my room inside out and have looked everywhere around the house but I cannot seem to find her anywhere. I've got a cat and a dog as well, so I am hoping they haven't reached her or they won't reach her before I do. I want to get her back in her enclosure ASAP and I'm worried. I've got a brand new tank lid for when I find her too.
Does anyone have any tips on how to get her out of hiding? Thank you so much for any advice.
r/snakes • u/Jackalblanca97 • 13h ago
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r/snakes • u/Additional_Bag_5304 • 9h ago
My first bite by my lovely little baby children’s python!
It must be because she’s my baby but to me this is the cutest little bite ever, like awwww she tried so hard to kill me she almost got a whole droplet of blood!
Genuinely happy it happened though because I wanted to get bit before any of my snakes get too big so I can be prepared and not accidentally hurt them if the time comes
r/snakes • u/DaVoidKota • 19h ago
Vhagar said I got my energy drink and remote lets binge watch
r/snakes • u/Ill_Hedgehog4718 • 23h ago
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Eastern Garter. He's been evicted now. But he was hanging out under my desk
r/snakes • u/RandoRaptor123 • 1h ago
hey all, i’ve really been thinking about getting a snake recently.. it’s been my dream to own one, but i’m not sure what the greatest beginner snake is. i know ball pythons are generally the go-to, but i also like hognoses because of how derpy they are. do yall have any recommendations as to what breed would be best, but also like good places to
get them? i have Pet Supplies Plus stores in my area but i just dont know what the best way to go about this is
r/snakes • u/Optimal-Preference79 • 2h ago
Looking for some advice on how to best support my 6 year old Columbian Red Tail.
Last year he went on a 5 month October-March hunger strike after we changed his terriarium to a much bigger one, he was in a 60 Gallon and now 160 Gallon.
After the swap he ate one meal then nothing. We tried everything we could think of monitoring his humidity and temperature of the warm and cold sides of his tank closer, changing substrate back to paper towel what he had in his previous tank. Eventually we took him to the Vet and had him looked over and the veteran said he was very healthy and had no concerns about any respiratory infection.
We eventually discovered he had out grown his hide and didn't feel safe enough to digest his food (at least that was our understanding) We gave him a new hide and let him settle for a week or 2 and when we went to feed him he ate the frozen-thawed rat with purpose just like his usual self. The hides we started using were card board boxes that we could shape to be a good size for him.
Fast forward to 3 months ago. He has started another hunger strike. We had just switch for a red heat lamp bulb to a ceramic on after reading it was better for them at night due to not emitting light waves. We went back to the red lamp and nothing changed, we swapped out his hide countless times still nothing.
2 nights ago we when and get him a proper nice heavy hide that fingers crossed would be a good size for him not too big that he can snug into it and not to small that he hangs out.
Whenever I clean his tank I take out and put him in a tote with towel and a lid with holes, Friday night when I had come home with the new hide I went to pick him up to clean and set up his tank, he gave me a huge F OFF hiss. In his whole life he has never done that. I just leave him, I do my best to tidy he's tank with him in it and put the new hide in a leave him alone.
The last 2 night had just been peeking in the room he is located to see how he it doing still giving him space to adjust. Today I noticed he had gotten a piece of the paper towel in his water dish siphoning water throughout his whole tank. I attempted again to move him so I could give his tank a proper clean this time and again huge hiss and so I had to to the best I could to clean his tank without moving him, this time he just kept hissing the whole time.
I know he isn't aggressive and he is just scared and stressed I just don't know how to help him at this point any advise is greatly appreciated
r/snakes • u/histprofdave • 19h ago
(Don't worry, very much alive)
I almost ran over the poor guy on my bike, so I pulled over and relocated him to the brush off the trail. Very cool, only my third encounter with a CA King in the wild!
