A wildlife technician caught and tagged a “stout” 4-foot-long eastern indigo snake in Georgia, and then he got a shock. After he tagged the snake, it puked up some things it had recently eaten. Those things included two other snakes, and one of them was still alive, and it had just eaten a big meal of its own.
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ (DNR) Wildlife Resources Division shared the story from late last year in a Facebook post yesterday.
“During a survey for federally protected eastern indigo snakes last November, wildlife technician Matt Moore came across an astonishing find. After catching and tagging a stout 4-foot-long indigo in southeast Georgia, Moore discovered that the snake had regurgitated two others: a young rat snake and a juvenile eastern diamond-backed rattlesnake.”
Georgia DNR reports that the rat snake was dead, and, initially, Moore thought the rattlesnake was dead too. An hour later, though, the rattlesnake showed signs of life and went to go bask in the sun—and probably ponder the fragility of life.
“To top off this remarkable event, the revived rattlesnake had a noticeable bulge, indicating it had recently eaten a large mouse,” Georgia DNR adds. “This unusual episode not only reveals the indigo’s impressive hunting abilities but also the rattlesnake’s unexpected resilience.”
As far as we know, the regurgitated rattlesnake did not then regurgitate its mouse meal to reveal a live mouse, although that would have just been the cherry on top of this bizarre story.
See the snake (and the puked-up snakes) here: