With spring around the corner, you might be worried about a rattlesnake encounter, but although they are in the desert around us, they won’t leave their encounters with humans to chance.
Nonetheless, this is Arizona, home of 13 rattlesnake species. As many as 12 representatives of these live in terrariums inside the Mesa Community College (MCC) Red Mountain Biology Department, but it would only be natural that others roam the college’s original desert campus freely.
“Many people don’t know rattlesnakes are out there, and they are being tracked,” explained Andy Bridges, an Arizona State University graduate biology student and coordinator for the Rattlesnake Tracking Project at MCC.
On a daily basis, one of Andy’s team of students screens various vital signs of five snakes, and logs the information into a spreadsheet. In the winter, locating the snakes gets a lot easier because they don’t move so much.
“The idea started in November 2007, when a rattlesnake was found on campus,” Andy recalled. This first snake was named Lola. Since then, Lola has continued to provide a real-life research opportunity for undergraduate students at MCC. The other four diamondbacks under observation are Ozzie, Zoe, Phoebe and Koko.
“This campus provides a unique environment, a desert island in an urban environment, to study behavior patterns in rattlesnakes,” Andy said. The snake trackers want to know what each snake’s home range size is, what habitat they choose, what they eat, how often they hunt, when they mate or how many offspring they produce.
Students from MCC