TEN THOUSAND SNAKE SNACKS: COMMUNITY SCIENCE DOCUMENTS SNAKE ECOLOGY AT A RACER’S PACE.

Isaac W Krone; University of California, Berkeley; ikrone@berkeley.edu; Alexey Katz, Andrew Durso, Eric Gren, Thomas Herrera, Erich Hoffmann, Daniel Hughes, Justin Lee, Natalie Ng, Kinsi Petersen, Spike Pike, Meg Scudder

Observations on the community science platform iNaturalist often carry more information than what users identify. These “secondary data” often include organisms other than the single organism identified by the community, and sometimes, the interactions between these organisms. By carefully combing through more than ten years of iNaturalist snake observations, we have compiled a growing database of more than 9,400 observations of snake predation. These observations span the globe (146 countries) and include 706 species of snakes, including some for which no previously published diet records exist. Our dataset is richest in the United States. Here, I take a closer look at the scope of this growing dataset, review some of the interesting records we’ve surfaced and compare the diets of a few common US snakes as revealed by previous literature and our community science observations.

Natural History of Snakes