10/23/2026
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have a snake that needs no introduction, the back beach buzzer, the diamond of the dunes, the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake (Crotalus adamanteus).
The Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake historically ranged from around New Orleans in Louisiana to the far edge of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It resides exclusively in the sandy coastal plain of the Southeast. Here in South Carolina, it haunts our barrier islands, sea islands, and the Longleaf Pine savannas of the Lowcountry. They need a wide swath of undisturbed habitat, ample food, and a warm climate. Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes benefit greatly from regular habitat disturbance, be that hurricanes, fire, or some facsimile of either. Regular fire and storms create the stump holes and brush piles they need to hide and hibernate, and they both encourage vegetation to grow fiercely in the understory, which provides food for small mammals, which in turn are food for Diamondbacks.
The Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake is the largest snake native to South Carolina, typically reaching four to six feet in length, sometimes bigger, and with incredible bulk. They are a surprisingly easy snake to overlook in situ but a hard one to forget once seen. Diamondbacks are masters of stealth. Their body is a blend of tan, white, and black scales. Their tan base color blends perfectly into the sands of the south. Black diamonds lined with white run the length of their spine, flanked in smaller black blocks, which dissolve their outline into the pallid sand and fire charred leaf litter. Their face wears a black diagonal band over the eye flanked by white lines, easily distinguishing them from our other vipers. When Diamondbacks don’t want to be seen, they won’t be. But when they want to be seen, they will be.
Like all rattlesnakes, the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake drags behind it a rattle on its tail tip. This rattle is formed from specialized interlocking scales, with a new segments added when the snake grows, one per molt. When threatened, a rattlesnake can vibrate this rattle at a blistering speed to induce a hair-raising buzz that draws all eyes to it. The Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake is bit of a showman, and will also coil up and raise its upper body off the ground to make itself even more visible. They’re much more likely to buzz and make a display than the more common Canebrake Rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus). This display is a deliberate show to protect the snake, by driving off would-be predators and careless creatures. But it’s no bluff either.
The Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake is our second most venomous snake in the Southeast, behind the secretive pacifist that is the Eastern Coral Snake (Micrurus fulvius). Diamondbacks use this venom to immobilize and kill their prey. Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes hunt small mammals mainly squirrels, rabbits, and rats. They are ambush hunters, smelling out the trails their prey cuts throughout the landscape. The snake then lies in wait, hidden in plain sight in some blind spot, for the perfect moment to strike. Like all pit vipers, Diamondbacks have heat vision. They can see the infrared light emitted from the bodies of warm-blooded animals and perceive this heat through the “pits” on their face, between their nose and eye. This lets them strike true even in pitch darkness. Their venom is potent enough to paralyze their prey almost instantly, before killing it outright, allowing the snake to swallow it whole without a fight. A proper bite from a Diamondback can readily kill a healthy human without intervention from antivenin, as their complex venom cocktail is highly hemotoxic, in addition to slightly neurotoxic, and will induce intense pain followed by widespread organ and tissue damage. However, rattlesnake bites are exceedingly rare in the Southeast. As I’ve preached time and time again snakes don’t want to bite you, especially rattlesnakes. That’s the whole dang point of the rattle! If you hear the rattle, best ske’daddle. They can’t eat you, so why bite you? Venom is incredibly resource intensive to produce for a cold-blooded reptile. They have nothing to gain from getting anywhere near you. They just want to be left in peace. The leading cause of snake bites by a country mile is: fooling with the snake. Don’t do that, leave the creature be. If it’s in your yard or in a shed and it doesn’t clear out in an hour, call a professional. Your life is valuable, and so is the snake’s.
For my outro here I’m not going to sugarcoat it and I’m not going to hold back. The Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake is in a bad way here in the Lowcountry. A real bad way. They need your help, your grace, and your compassion. We’re going to lose this amazing snake from South Carolina if we don’t all do something about it. We’re poised to rip a page from the tale of our natural history. I’ve heard the tales of yore from every old timer and cousin on this Island. I’ve walked the very same tracts of dirt, incessantly, here my whole near ten-year long career. I’ve found things, wonderful things, things no one has ever noticed, all across this Island. I’ve never once seen a Diamondback on Edisto. Just in the last thirty years they’ve gone from abundant on Edisto Island to nearly extirpated. This isn’t just here, it’s happening almost everywhere in South Carolina. Diamondbacks have been practically extirpated from North Carolina and the North Coast of South Carolina. Just a handful are hanging on in the Francis Marion National Forest, due only in part to the Forest Service’s jam up habitat management work and decades of research and outreach by a few people who care a whole lot. Diamondbacks are still holding strong around Port Royal Sound and Ridgeland, but who knows for how long they’ll withstand trampling under the heels of hordes of developers. Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes may disappear from east of the Savannah in another thirty years. That is unacceptable.
For centuries Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes have been relentless persecuted by man, ever since Europeans arrived in the Southeast. They’ve been shot, cleaved, and bludgeoned without quarter. And still they defiantly clung to this coast, as resilient as the sandy land itself. But everything has its breaking point. Today they are being overwhelmed by the unholy trinity that has doomed many a species: unrestricted killing, habitat destruction, and disease. The wanton culling of these secretive creatures is hard to stop, as people have an innate fear of snakes. Here in eastern North America, that instinctual fear is often misplaced as we have but a few venomous snakes. Those we do have are generally pacifists and modern medicine makes antivenin readily available. So rarely is a snake in a place at a time an immediate threat to life or limb, and it is never a threat best solved with a shovel. It takes time, but folks are slowly learning the snake mean no harm and are best left alone. Rattlesnake roundups are today all but another sad fact of the past. Yet people nonetheless still shoot, shovel, and roadkill these wild animals with glee. Since these snakes are so long-lived, the loss of one adult snake has immense negative impacts that ripple decades into the future for its local population. Thus, every snake saved helps save the species overall.
Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes face a far more existential threat than rattlesnake roundups and opportunistic killings: habitat destruction. Killing of a snake is a temporary loss, as the absence of that creature on the landscape creates the opportunity for another to one day take its place. The loss of habitat erases instead that entire opportunity. It is a permanent loss to the overall capacity of a species, the flattening of their future. Habitat destruction comes in three main forms: degradation, fragmentation, and loss. Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes are dependent on regular disturbance to maintain the landscape in the ideal conditions for them to hunt. So these snakes move throughout the landscape from year to follow disturbance patterns and live where conditions are best. The better the habitat, the less space an individual snake needs. Conversely, Diamondback need more land the less suitable that land is. If the quality of that habitat hits a critical low threshold, they can’t hang on any longer and must relocate. A lack of fire on the landscape, thanks to mid-twentieth-century fire suppression, has largely degraded Lowcountry habitat for Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes. This reduces the carrying capacity of that land, forcing snakes to adopt wider home ranges, and imposing an artificial cap on their population numbers. This makes them more susceptible to the dangers of habitat fragmentation. Habitats become fragmented by human infrastructure and development. Wild areas are set adrift like inland islands in a sea of suburban sprawl or carved apart by rivers of asphalt. For species, like the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake, which need expansive functioning landscapes, they are impacted acutely by habitat fragmentation. The fragmenting features carved by man into the landscape bring wildlife into direct contact with people, be that snakes haplessly wandering into backyards and meeting the business end of a shovel or snakes having to risk their lives every time they cross the road. High traffic roads and highways, acutely, are a huge threat for Diamondbacks. These are long slow animals that look like sticks and freeze when startled who now have to jaywalk through high speed traffic, and it whittles away their populations near roads far faster than they can compensate. Lastly, habitat loss is the complete eradication of that useable space on the landscape. It is not degraded nor fragmented, it is wiped slick from the face of the Earth. A hole in the ground now occupied by something unnatural. Not only is it degrading the margins of that specific area and contributing to the fragmentation of the landscape, it is now totally lost and utterly unusable for a given species. These three factors together form the force of habitat destruction that has pushed Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes out of most of their natural range here in South Carolina. This is why land protection, the preservation of connected landscapes, and the establishment of habitat corridors are each so indescribably important to the conservation of wildlife, not just Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes, but nearly all walks of life here in the Lowcountry.
And the third arm on this terrible trifecta is a the most insidious pressure of all: disease. More precisely diseases, plural, as there are multiple pathogens wreaking havoc in not just Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake populations, but nearly all of our native snakes. Snake Fungal Disease (Ophidiomyces ophidiicola), often shortened to SFD or Oo, is a fungal infection of the skin of snakes that causes ophidiomycosis, resulting in severe dermatitis, lesions, scale loss, and internal inflammation that can eventually lead to death, and generally is not good thing for an animal that drags itself across the ground. Although many individual snakes are able to withstand the infection and live relatively normal lives, it is now a continual threat, stress, and burden that these animals have to bear for their entire lives. Meaning one bad day can put them on an irrecoverable downward spiral. Snake Fungal Disease has already become a severe, if not existential, threat to a terrifying number of native snake species across the United States. Snake Fungal Disease made its way to the United States sometime in the mid-20th century from unknown origins and was first discovered about 2008 in the Midwest. It’s now made its way to South Carolina and is also suspected to now be infecting aquatic turtles, in addition to native snakes. Snake Lungworm (Raillietiella orientalis) is an endoparasite from the obscure Pentastome lineage of crustaceans. These parasites are believed to have made their way into the native snake populations of the United States through Burmese Pythons (Python bivittatus), a natural host, that escaped from the pet trade into the Florida Everglades. This parasite has a multistage, complicated life cycle where its eggs are picked up from the environment by a scavenging insect, which gets eaten by a frog, lizard, or small mammal, and that little critter is then gulped down by a snake, completing the cycle. The Snake Lungworm lives within the body cavity of the snake and feeds on its blood. Our native snake species often have little to no innate ability to control this infection, and can be overwhelmed by the stress of carrying these parasites. This parasite can be especially severe when you consider their original host, the Burmese Python, is a much much larger snake than anything found in the United States. To date, Snake Lungworm has not been found outside of Florida, but is marching northward up the East Coast and has already reached North Florida. Combine Snake Fungal Disease and Snake Lungworm, and it’s a slow death sentence. Rattlesnakes, including the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake, have been especially hard hit. This problem is also not just these new exotic diseases. Habitat destruction, alongside a warming and extremifying climate, is placing Diamondbacks under a great deal of stress that compromises their immune system and further concentrates snakes together into shrinking habitat, increasing the rate of infections dramatically. Once a snake is infected with one of these exotic diseases, their immune system becomes overwhelmed and that weakness exposes them to infection from all the other natural diseases present in the environment. What may have been a simple bacterial infection in a vacuum is now the straw that breaks the camel’s back. All these stress factors compound and magnify.
Things are looking dire for Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes here in South Carolina. So what can we all do? First off, don’t run over Rattlesnakes. If a Diamondback shows up where you don’t want it, walk away and leave it be. If it has to go, call a qualified and conservation-minded professional to have it relocated safe and unharmed. Please don’t kill it. Second, don’t touch snakes and don’t move them around. That can spread disease. Also, support the institutions and nonprofits, like the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy (ARC), the Orianne Society, and the Rattlesnake Conservancy in their research, survey work, and restoration efforts to study and preserve these unique creatures across their ranges. Third, support land conservation in South Carolina. The purchase of new public lands and the dedication of conservation easements on private lands collectively ensure vast swaths of wild, open spaces for Rattlesnake to roam peacefully, far from the dangers wrought by man. If we don’t all act now, change our tune, and start caring, in earnest, about the natural wonders of the Lowcountry, then soon Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes will be gone from the whole Edisto Island, the ACE Basin, and all but the most remote havens on this State. That is a bad ending that must never come to be.
-Tom A.
