The Everglades (aka the Orange) Rat Snake is probably the most controversial rat snake of all times. Two questions may be asked: 1) Does the Everglades Rat Snake exist today and 2) Did the Everglades Rat Snake ever exist?



I can only speculate on question number one. My answer to that is “perhaps.” But my answer to question number two is an unequivocal “yes.” Yes, until the human intervention in the sheet water flow from the Kissimmee Prairie to the Everglades, until sod farms, sugarcane, and peanut farms replaced the vast expanses of waving sawgrass and scattered hammocks, this most beautiful (if you like orange) of the eastern rat snakes not only existed, but was abundant.

But with this having been said, if you subscribe to the genetic theories (many of which are themselves controversial, even faulty) that are sweeping across the herpetological world right now, the Everglades rat snake never did exist. It was at best a localized color phase of the black (eastern) rat snake and is now known as Pantherophis alleghaniensis.

What is (or was) an Everglades rat snake?

This Florida snake, described by Wilfred T. Neill in 1949 as Elaphe obsoleta rossalleni, was a rich orange both above and below. The four stripes were variably visible but not well defined. Secondary characteristics included a yellow-orange to orange chin (a little white may be present along the mental groove) and throat, deep orange eyes and a red tongue -- not black, not even red and black (the latter is an intergrade characteristic), just a plain solid red. Like others of this complex, the Everglades Rat Snake attained a length of 5 to 6-plus feet.

Even when I first visited Florida in the 1950s, the Everglades were no longer pristine, but Everglades Rat Snakes were abundant. US highway 27, then a narrow 2-lane roadway, was still closely edged along its western border with a broad, flowing, sawgrass prairie. Along the eastern edge of US 27 was a line of huge introduced Australian pines, backed by what was then proving to be a very effective drainage canal. But the adverse modifications of the natural hydrology was still new enough that yellow rat snakes (then Elaphe obsoleta quadrivittata) of the dryer uplands had not yet genetically swamped the more localized, much oranger, and common, Everglades Rat Snake.

As the years passed, wet prairie along US 27’s west side was drained and replaced by sugarcane plantations and sodfields. Following the ever expanding dryness the yellow rats swept in from all four compass points and intergraded with the beautiful orange rat snakes of the Lake Okeechobee region. Today, even the occasional pretty orange rat snake found by hobbyists usually has sufficient phenotypic abnormality to be readily identified as an intergrade.

So, do Everglades rat snakes persist? Phenotypically, perhaps, but very rarely, and genetically probably not. So overwhelming are the hidden yellow rat snake genes that even the best of today’s Everglades rats seldom breed true.

Sadly, it seems that the hobbyists of today, identifying the rat snakes they find primarily by location and only secondarily by appearance, are not easily able to appreciate the true beauty of the Everglades Rat Snakes of yesteryear. Human intervention has not been kind to this colorful and one time plentiful snake.

More photos under the jump...