Meet one of my favorite snake species

Hello everyone! This is Evan again from the Herpetology Team, and today I wanted to talk to you about one of my favorite snakes, Sistrurus catenatus, or the eastern massasauga rattlesnake. This species of rattlesnake is found mostly east of the Mississippi River in the northern Midwest: Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin, as well as Pennsylvania, New York, and parts of Ontario, Canada. Being from the Midwest myself, this species always feels like a symbol of Midwest Herpetology and home to me.  

The eastern massasauga rattlesnake is a small species of rattlesnake, averaging 18.5-30” long, with blotch patterning of grey, brown, and black coloration. They are heavy-bodied individuals with triangular shaped heads, cat-like pupils, and a small rattle. They do not always rattle, instead relying on remaining hidden, but when they do rattle it only makes a light buzzing sound. Their primary diet includes rodents: voles, mice, moles, and shrews as well as other snakes and occasionally birds and frogs. And, like many vipers, they give birth to live young.  

Due to being a northern species, they are typically only active April-October. During the winter, they hibernate in crawfish burrows that are situated just below the frost line. They usually return to the same hibernaculum sites every year. In the wild, eastern massasaugas live in a variety of wetland habitats including bogs, fens, shrub swamps, wet meadows, marshes, moist grasslands, wet prairies, and floodplain forests. They used to be common across their range, but due to prairie habitat loss, fragmentation, and targeted hunting of rattlesnakes, they have been extirpated from most of their historical range and now survive in disjunct populations. This led them to becoming federally listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 2016. The historical prairie ecosystem in the Midwest is down to an estimated 1-4% of its original range. On the more local level, states, universities, and other organizations have been monitoring populations of eastern massasaugas for many years.  

Within the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), there is an AZA SAFE: Saving Animals from Extinction program for eastern massasaugas that Zoo Atlanta is a part of. We currently house a pair of individuals that have been recommended to breed to keep the AZA population stable and contribute to zoological breeding efforts. We are hopeful that they will be able to have babies soon. There is also a long-standing study that takes place in Michigan that we attend every year, where liaisons from different AZA facilities go to survey the site to record data on this population. Information gained from these surveys contributes to knowledge about the natural history of these animals and how we can better maintain their habitat and populations as well as potentially contribute to expanding their range and numbers.  

Evan H.
Herpetology Team