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It is October, the scary season of the year, and Ferrebeekeeper is working towards our annual Halloween special feature at the end of the month. Before we get there however, let’s pause to appreciate an exceedingly beautiful snake, Drepanoides anomalus, the black-collared snake of South America. The tiny but handsome snake can be found in the neotropical forests of the great Southern continent in a range stretching from French Guyana across Brazil, and from Colombia down through Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. For those of you following along on a globe, that is an epic range…and yet, so little is known about this tiny snake here in the north (or anywhere online, for that matter) that it is hard to speak sensibly about its habits and proclivities. It is a rear-fanged snake notable for a nocturnal lifestyle and for its propensity for eating eggs of he many many sorts found in its region. This genus contains only the single living species. What we can say for certain is that this is an endearingly winsome little snake with appealing eyes and a gorgeous red body. I can’t decide whether its tiny white headband looks like a clergyman’s collar or like a cartoon bandage, but it does make me think we could do better in English than “black collared snake.” If anyone out there knows anything about this mysterious creature, please let us know!
Egg-eating Snake (Dasypeltis fasciata) photo by Bill Bouton
To continue “egg week” we encounter a creature which not only reproduces through laying eggs, it lives entirely by eating them! Meet Dasypeltis, a genus of colubrid snakes of Africa. There are 12 recognized species of Dasypeltis snakes ranging across the great continent (they are non-venomous, by the way). These serpents are all oophagous , which is to say they eat eggs… In fact they are exclusively oophagous—they eat nothing but eggs! Gosh!
The adult snakes range in size from 30-100 cm (12-39 inches) in length and come in a variety of unobtrusive colors. They have ridiculous jaws of vast flexibility which can expand to many times the diameter of their head so that they can eat eggs which are much wider than their bodies. This leads to some disturbing-yet-amazing-photographs which would make even the greatest champion-eater envious. Egg-eating snakes have a highly developed sense of smell–they are capable of telling if an egg has gone off, or if it has developed past a point where it is easily digestible.
Photo by David A. Northcott
These egg-eating snakes do not have teeth as such; instead they have hard ridges on their spine which allow the snakes to break open the eggs after swallowing them. So once the egg is safely inside the snake’s gullet, the hungry creature breaks it into pieces inside itself and sucks the nutrients out (whereupon it regurgitates all the shell fragments). This strikes me as an insane way to get nutrients, but it apparently works surprisingly well: snake nutritionists (?) calculate that “snakes are remarkably efficient and waste very little of the contents of an egg.” Because of the way egg-eating works in the wild–where one tends to discover a lot of eggs at once or none at all—the snakes can eat a number of eggs in one uh…sitting (can I say “sitting” in this context?). They then go semi-dormant during the wet season (all of which means that distraught reptile enthusiasts sometimes force feed quail eggs to their pet egg-eating snakes—which also strikes me as insane).
Photo by Jonathan Brecko
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