Coral Snake

Coral snakes are easy to recognize with their distinctive coloration. They have alternating red, yellow and black bands starting with black - yellow - black - yellow - red - black - yellow - red.

The yellow bands are shorter than the black and red bands. There do however exist counterfeit Coral Snakes with alternating yellow and red bands not flanked by black bands, which are not true North American Coral Snakes.

The Coral Snakes belongs to genus with the Latin name Micrurus.

Usually they are shorter than 40 inches (1 meter) and have smaller mouths and fangs compared to e.g. the Cottonmouth and the Copperhead. This makes envenomations of humans more difficult.

Habitat

The Coral Snake occupies a variety of habitats. Usually they are found beneath debris or under flatwood in all sorts of places like very dry areas, areas with a lot of scrubs that offers protection to wet areas on the borders of swamps etc.

Coral Snake Venom

The venom from a Coral Snake will cause weakness and paralysis in severe cases (Heard et al., 1999)¹. The paralysis often happens in the respiratory system, but serious injuries from the Coral Snake haven't been reported lately. According to an article by Norris MD (2006)², less than 1 percent of snake bites in the United States are from Coral Snakes.

Diet

The favorite prey of the coral snake is primarily other reptiles and small lizards, amphibians like frogs and small mammals. It's cannibalistic and doesn't refrain from eating other coral snakes. Young birds and insects are also a part of its daily diet.

Coral Snake Bite

To release its venom into a prey it has to squeeze its venom containing glands by chewing on its the prey. Because it is very secretive in its habit bites on humans are reported very seldom. Prey usually dies from either shock or from respiratory paralysis (effectively suffocation) caused by the neurotoxic venom. The smaller you are the less likely a bite from a coral snake will make you pass away. Children tend to be attracted to the snakes bright colors - so keep an eye on those teenagers!

Life Cycle

Coral snakes lay eggs which hatch out in the open. A female usually lay 3 to 5 eggs in June or July. Young snakes, at the size of earthworms, hatches 2-3 months later. At the time of hatching the young coral snakes bears the same color pattern as adult snakes.

A saying to help identify the Coral Snake

There's a rhyme that can help you identifying a Coral Snake.

If red touches yellow - it kills a fellow ... or ... are no friend of mine

This means what it says, but the likelihood of actually dying from a Coral Snake bite is very small.

If red touches black, it is a friend of Jack ...

Then it's not a Coral Snake but another snake.

References

¹Heard et al. "Antivenom Therapy in the Americas", Drugs Vol. 58(1): pp. 5-15 (1999)
²Norris, MD "Snake Envenomations, Coral", eMedicine June 2006

Resources

Coral Snake at Wikipedia
Snakes of Georgia and South Carolina
Eastern Coral Snake

---

Privacy policy: Third-part advertisers may use cookies and beacons that can provide them with information about your geographic location but not e-mail, identity etc. Google, as a third party vendor uses the DART cookie to serve ads based on the users visits to other sites. Users may opt out of the Dart cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network - other cookies are disabled in the browser settings.