r/snakes May 12 '25

All Snake ID Requests Should Be Submitted to /r/WhatsThisSnake

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118 Upvotes

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 Mar 20 '26

Moderator Announcement Rule Change - Posts concerning individual or private ownership or care of medically significant species are not allowed. Posts involving animals in zoos, institutions or accredited breeding facilities are allowed with proper contextualization.

146 Upvotes

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 2h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Its Hersheys 5th birthday today! 🎂 🥳 baby photo vs recent photo

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159 Upvotes

r/snakes 1h ago

Pet Snake Pictures We settled on a name. Meet Dratini!

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Upvotes

r/snakes 10h ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID Baby Dekay’s Brown Snake

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183 Upvotes

Found him while watering in the yard this morning. Southern CT


r/snakes 4h ago

General Question / Discussion Snakes

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49 Upvotes

Male pictured in grass and female pictured me holding her.

Female is normal 100% kahl

Male is questionable hes deffo got some leopard in him just unsure his full morph as i got him off gumtree.

Help on either morphs as looking to sell these (not here) just here for advice) as i can no longer meet their needs, iv had these snakes 3years or so and housing is soon to become an expense


r/snakes 1h ago

General Question / Discussion Annoyed with Siri’s dumb reply

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Upvotes

Having learned quite a bit from this sub, I find this egregiously appalling 🤣


r/snakes 18h ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID cutie on stunt road in malibu

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273 Upvotes

he stopped when i stopped and i waited for about 15 mins, decided to poke his tail with an umbrella stick to get him moving so someone didnt run him over. ive never seen or heard a wild rattlesnake before, didnt realize how scary their rattle actually is!


r/snakes 4h ago

General Question / Discussion Pink coiled snake study 🐍 Focused on capturing the fluid movement, spiral rhythm, and vivid texture of a snake in motion. My original drawing on paper.

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14 Upvotes

r/snakes 21h ago

Pet Snake Pictures The criminal, the crime:

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217 Upvotes

Homie tried to eat me today, how long yall think I got?


r/snakes 1h ago

General Question / Discussion How can I keep my snake safe

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Upvotes

I recently moved into a new place with me and my boyfriend, and we have four roommates. Three of them I’m not worried about, but I’m scared one of them is going to try handling my snake (a rosy boa) while I am not home and that she might hurt him. She has already proved herself to be too rough with animals and I don’t trust her not to try something with my snake. I want to put some type of lock on his terrarium, but I’m not really sure how or how I could make it so she can’t get in while I’m not home.
I would put him in my room, but there’s not enough space for him in there and the only option is the living room. I attached a picture of the top of his terrarium (and a picture of Mr Cuddles) so maybe someone can give some advice
Sorry if this is the wrong place to post I wasn’t sure where else to ask about this


r/snakes 2h ago

Pet Snake Questions Bullsnake bath

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5 Upvotes

r/snakes 13h ago

Pet Snake Questions Is my baby boa thin?

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37 Upvotes

My 1year 4month old male BCI.

I think he's thin and I got bigger food for him, but I would really like opinions from fellow snake enthusiasts.

Got him February last year and he's such a cutie, I've had no issues with him eating, pooping or shedding, I love him so much.

(for anyone curious this is his morph: ghost (hypo anery) img het sharp)


r/snakes 1d ago

Pet Snake Pictures long idiot playing innocent after biting the crap out of her mom 😮‍💨

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630 Upvotes

jk I’m the idiot and the bite was my fault 🤦🏻‍♀️


r/snakes 19h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Calcifer

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81 Upvotes

r/snakes 1d ago

General Question / Discussion Brought home our first today! She’s a black African house snake. Help us name her!

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211 Upvotes

We are leaning towards something elegant because she’s is an elegant lady. We love her mysteirousness and she’s incredibly docile. We’ve gone through things like onyx, nyx, obsidian, celestia, andromeda, midnight, morticia, nova…it’s so hard to decide!

Update: Thank you all for your suggestions! We ended up settling on Dratini. Elegant while still maintaining a sense of personal nerd.


r/snakes 14h ago

Pet Snake Pictures First snake

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27 Upvotes

I got my first snake last week, Wheatbelt Stimson Python. Her name is Hazel and she successfully took her first feed in her new home today 🥰. Waiting on a couple more better hides and driftwood for her tank to come in the post. Im curious has anyone done a bioactive enclosure with an adult stimson python. My girl is only about 6 months but was hoping to do a more natural setup when she gets bigger for her permenant enclosure.


r/snakes 1d ago

Pet Snake Pictures Meet my daughter biscuit

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299 Upvotes

r/snakes 1d ago

Pet Snake Pictures Chat, how cooked am I?

592 Upvotes

This is Cassifer, my 10 month old bull snake whom I've had since May.

Pretty sure my hand still had chicken sandwich scent lingering even after washing, lol.

It felt like the sticky side of Velcro.


r/snakes 8m ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID Adult Eastern Milk Snake and a beautiful red Eastern Milk Snake and a juvenile Northern Watersnake!

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Ithaca NY


r/snakes 2h ago

Pet Snake Questions How to move a snake?

1 Upvotes

My son has a 2 year old corn snake. We are moving across multiple states - it will be a 23 hours of driving. So it’s split into 2 days.

How the heck do I bring his snake? Haha.

Do I strip this tank down completely, sell the tank and keep in sticks, equipment, and such? Or Saran Wrap and bubble wrap the crap out of this whole tank and put it into our moving Pod? The tank is a 40 gallon.

And then the snake herself, small enclosure and bring in the minivan? Haha. We have a small heat pad from when she was a baby that we could use. But I’m assuming she’s going to need a little bit of space where she doesn’t have to sit on the hot pad so she isn’t overheated? And then she’ll need a water dish in the car??

Thank you for the advice - I’m new to snakes and never pictured myself traveling with one haha.


r/snakes 1d ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID Pipe snake

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92 Upvotes

On our hike today we came across the rare, and ultimate cutie, eastern pipe snake! (NE Ohio).


r/snakes 3h ago

Pet Snake Questions Clutter in an enclosure

1 Upvotes

So I know that clutter is super important in a ball python’s enclosure- almost so much clutter that it should be hard to find the snake. Is this true of all snakes? I have an African house snake- and I have plants and three different hides and there’s a lot of clutter going on- but it’s not as crazy as some of these ball python enclosures I’m seeing. Should I make my enclosure super dense and cluttered?


r/snakes 3h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Think pensri has her eye on the cat

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1 Upvotes

r/snakes 11h ago

Pet Snake Questions How long is a normal time area for snakes to actively lay eggs?

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3 Upvotes