VARIABLE CORAL SNAKES
AT DUSK

Until recently I've been fond of telling everyone that, despite the local belief that many kinds of venomous snakes are abundant here, I've never seen one venomous species in the northern Yucatan. I have indeed seen many snakes the locals claimed were venomous, but which were perfectly harmless, especially "false corals." My impression has been that, in terms of dangerous snakes, this area is much, much safer than, say, southern Mississippi with its many rattlers, cottonmouths and copperheads.

Monday at dusk as I approached my lodging a two-ft- long Variable Coral Snake, MICRURUS DIASTEMA, lay upon the steps right before my door. It was almost dark but I could plainly see the red, black and yellow banding of the snake's body, and I was able to lean over the snake and confirm the pattern sequence needed for a snake to be a dangerous coral and not a harmless mimic. Paying close attention to what I saw, I recited this little poem under my breath:

"Red on yellow
Will kill a fellow... "

In other words, to be a real coral snake -- at least in this part of the world -- the banding must be arrayed so that the red bands are always bound by narrow, yellow bands. It must look as if a red band has been affixed atop a larger yellow band, with just the edges of the yellow band showing at the red band's edges.

That's what I saw. One of the mimics here, the Red Coffee Snake, also can have its red areas framed with yellow, but its black parts are mere spots on the back, not solid bands completely encircling the body. I definitely had a coral snake here.

Moreover, now that I saw how the snake behaved I grew convinced that another snake I'd recently encountered at dusk, also on some steps nearby, also had been a coral. It had been too dark then for me to see the colors, but I clearly saw the shape, the banding and the behavior. The behavior these two snakes shared was this: When the snake grew agitated he squirmed much more vigorously than normal for an escaping snake on a smooth surface, and every couple of seconds the snakes would suddenly launch their heads upwards and snap the air two or three times before falling back onto the ground and continuing to squirm.

Up north when I find rattlers, cottonmouths and copperheads in places where they might hurt people I put them into buckets and carry them to more isolated places. These snakes behaved far too violently and aggressively for me to fool with them, and they graciously escaped into the bushes before I could think too much about the matter.

Coral snakes are very dangerous. They're in the same snake family as cobras and mambas. Because of their small heads I've been told that corals can't bite anything larger than a finger. However, my new field guide says that they're able to gape their mouths so wide that they can bite almost any part of the human body where the skin is loose enough to be even slightly pinched so it can be held in a bite. Now when I go out jogging before sunrise my ankles tingle in anticipation...

One more note: Our Variable Coral species, different from the Central American Coral which doesn't occur here, but possibly the same as the Mayan Coral Snake found to the southeast, is truly variable. The greatest variation is in the numbers, and therefore the widths, of its colored bands. Variable Corals in northern Guatemala south of here may have as many as 50 black bands, but here in the northern Yucatan they may have as few as 12, the red bands expanding at the expense of the other bands. In fact, the snake I saw Monday basically looked like a red snake with widely spaced black bands. I didn't have the presence of mind to count his black bands but surely there were no more than 12, and my impression was that there were fewer.

You can see a Variable Coral Snake at the bottom of the picture (a False Coral at the top, one we don't have here) at http://www.fathom.com/feature/122594/3522_snake9_LG.html.

An Excerpt from  March 11, 2006:

A while back I passed along a little poem that helps distinguish a real coral snake from most coral look-alikes. It was:

Red on yellow
Will kill a fellow.

Justin in Ottawa, Ontario, sends the following, which I suspect may be the original form:

Red touches yellow,
You're a dead fellow.
Red touches black,
You're OK Jack!