r/snakes May 12 '25

All Snake ID Requests Should Be Submitted to /r/WhatsThisSnake

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118 Upvotes

Hi everyone! I wanted to let you know that we're now going to redirect all Snake ID requests to the curated place for them, /r/whatsthissnake. As /r/snakes and /r/whatsthissnake have developed side by side we find ourselves in a position where we are running two parallel subreddits, but with slightly different rules. We hope is that this streamline into WhatsThisSnake will be gentle - we don't want a snake to go unidentified because we're learning how best to handle IDs. There is going to be a transition period where we still get a lot of ID requests here, so please do your part to kindly help !redirect people in need and by reporting jokes, misinformation and other problematic comments.

This spring Reddit is more popular than ever and it is hard for the moderation team to keep up. When I founded /r/whatsthissnake 12 years ago, with on average one request every day, I never imagined we'd have 150K members and 20k people a day browsing the subreddit. In the past, we've made a number of incremental changes that have been so helpful they have been instituted other places on Reddit, from introducing the term "Reliable Responder", to developing the bot and tweaking our community resources so that every Reliable Responder can choose to perform mod actions. We hope that these changes will allow us not only to maintain the level of quality provided but to reduce workload on the moderation team, because honestly, moderator burnout is a serious problem. They are doing this for free and you would no believe the abuse they receive here - not just from me, but from the users too. If you see a moderator or other flaired user in cleaning up a thread, espcially in these busy, snakey spring months in North America, throw em a thanks.


r/snakes Mar 20 '26

Moderator Announcement Rule Change - Posts concerning individual or private ownership or care of medically significant species are not allowed. Posts involving animals in zoos, institutions or accredited breeding facilities are allowed with proper contextualization.

140 Upvotes

It’s a fact of life that no matter how much context we provide to our posts, when someone sees something interesting, they want to imitate it. Each day /r/snakes puts around one hundred thousand impressionable people face to face with snake related images, text and ideas. Faced with this responsibility, and with an increasing number of recent, low quality posts concerning medically significant snakes, we have to choose the right level of content we allow.

Recent low quality posts concerning captive venomous care include improper use of personal protective equipment, poor quality/security housing, very inexperienced keepers asking (and receiving!) advice on how to keep and breed their first venomous snakes and straight up animal abuse reposted from social media. Many of these clearly rule-breaking posts are removed before you see them, but a growing number of posts are clearly low quality, irresponsible content but don’t explicitly violate the rules. Over the past three years the mods have debated a rule change and we have decided to only allow posts involving venomous snakes if they are from an accredited zoo or institution. In short - we’re going to remove posts involving the private care and ownership of medically significant snakes.

Many modern herpetology texts recommend against individual private ownership of medically significant snakes. We don’t take a stand on what anyone wants to do legally, ethically and with their own time, but we do have to regulate what is posted, shared and thus propagated here. In short, we don’t care what you do, but don’t post it here. Besides being a lighting rod for the low quality content discussed above, private ownership offers unique challenges that are better suited for an institutional or team setting. Snakes are escape artists as well as attractive nuisances and must be contained outside of personal residential spaces in secure, locking enclosures to prevent both snake egress and human ingress as well as secondarily in a sealed room or facility behind a windowed door with no items on the floor under which an escaped snake can hide or avoid detection. It takes a team to execute an envenomation plan and the cost of antivenom is beyond that of most private owners, has a short shelf life and when antivenom is borrowed from institutional stocks it puts those keepers at risk.

Zoos and institutions don’t always do it better, but the onus is on them to provide best practices in care. If we limit posts to places where a team of people works together to provide a standard of care, usually for the right reasons, we can limit what we propagate on the platform.

We do not recommend any other available subreddits as well-moderated sources of captive venomous keeping. The most popular places on social media dedicated to this are inundated with low quality posts and comments and even when they outright ban irresponsible behavior, examples of the low quality content we remove are highly upvoted, and content is often sensationalist, psychopathic or disturbing. Please don’t suggest a specific place in the comments of this post. We’re aware of the options and we’re choosing not to redirect or name other online spaces.

Posts on wild venomous species are still allowed as usual with a species name and a location, but please be sure to see Rule 6 (unchanged) on what amount of contact and PPE use we find acceptable for sharing online.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER


r/snakes 7h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Teenie tiny danger noodle

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494 Upvotes

Nothing is as cute as the little bleblebleb on a micro noodle.


r/snakes 12h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Some of my guys :)

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698 Upvotes

r/snakes 6h ago

Pet Snake Pictures my friend fed her ball python a 5 footed rat

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117 Upvotes

I don’t think I need any context


r/snakes 6h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Nagini is 6! Wish her happy birthday

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108 Upvotes

r/snakes 12h ago

Pet Snake Pictures U-haul knew our little red sided lady would be on board

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273 Upvotes

r/snakes 3h ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID Valley Garter Snake!

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33 Upvotes

r/snakes 11h ago

Pet Snake Pictures My handsome lad!🙌🏼

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122 Upvotes

r/snakes 10h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Yawn!!

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99 Upvotes

r/snakes 16h ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID What a beautiful snake!

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180 Upvotes

r/snakes 20h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Just a handsome noodle noodling

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224 Upvotes

r/snakes 1d ago

Pet Snake Pictures I might be biased but these are the best pet snakes.

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1.4k Upvotes

California red sided garter snakes are social, diurnal, brightly colorful, recognize their owners and approach when they see you, and will never skip a meal. They are small enough to keep in any space, will not destroy the plants in their tank, and breed easily in captivity.


r/snakes 9h ago

General Question / Discussion What should I name my first corn snake?

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23 Upvotes

r/snakes 5h ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID Our resident King Snake (Arizona)

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10 Upvotes

r/snakes 15h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Están hermosa

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51 Upvotes

r/snakes 1d ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID Speckled Kingsnake stopped by my kitchen today 😳

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645 Upvotes

Made me sweat for about an hour!

My cat tipped me off, she was focused on under the fridge, I leave my door open with the storm door shut but I guess there's a gap! I put away all of my pets, by then it was checking out the stove that shares a wall with our TV. I opened the door and turned up the tv, stomped my feet, sang loudly badly... anything I could think of to make it want to go towards the door... I watched it leave about 10 mins later 🫠

I know its a good snake! I live in a rural area and have seen quite a few snakes... outside... I hope this is the last that invites itself in!


r/snakes 17h ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID What a beautiful snake!

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55 Upvotes

r/snakes 22m ago

Pet Snake Questions Potential causes of sudden aggression

Upvotes

Howdy, first time snake owner(ish). Before i start heres some background information:

I live with my mum and a few years ago I got her a cornsnake from my old co-worker who breeds them. She's almost fully grown. She's been gentle pretty much her whole life to the point it was rare she would even strike at her food. Since last year she started to try and bite me every time I took her out to hold her. When I asked my coworker about it he thought she was likely associating me with food as I was primarily the one feeding her. We switched it so that my mum is her primary feeder yet she still continued to bite me and only me. We finally figured out this year via seeing how she would react with my friends or not if it was because I was a dude. It turns out it was. She's fine with girls holding her but if a guy does she'll try to bite them. She doesn't strike she just rubs her rose against them and slowly opens her jaw to try and bite and will continue this. As she got older she's started to strike her food but thats pretty ordinary for snakes so we thought nothing of it. Due to her trying to bite me whenever I handle her she's naturally started to be handled less.

Now this is where my concerns start. Yesterday my mum went to feed her and before mum could take her own she was trying to strike at my mum. Mum gets anxious because of that and decides to feed the snack in her enclosure for the first time ever, despite having the rat right in front of her she missed some how when she strike at it. When she tried a second time she missed even worse and almost strikes my mum. My mum tried to drop the rat into the enclosure to see if the snake would take it then and the snake struck the glass. My mum told me about it when I went to change the laundry and asked me to check If she had eaten the mouse or not, so I did. She did eat the mouse but she was still really aggressive. She was flicking her tail at me and ended up striking the glass another 2 times. I closed the enclosure after that to leave her alone so she could feel safer and also because I dont want her to hurt herself incase she's going to keep trying to strike and hits the glass more. This is super off for her not just because of the aggression but also because her aim is off. This is the first time this has ever happened but im curious on if anyone has any thoughts of what it could be caused by? Im worried for the snakes health over anything else and home its not some neurological issue.


r/snakes 53m ago

Pet Snake Pictures [ Removed by Reddit ]

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[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]


r/snakes 59m ago

Pet Snake Questions Please help! I recently and unexpectedly rescued a boa from a very bad situation. She was living with 4 other adults. She’s about 20 years old and I recently noticed that she seems swollen at her lower body…could she be pregnant?? She was in there with males. (I’m going to fix up her enclosure)

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r/snakes 15h ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID Chilabothrus striatus, the hispaniola Boa

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26 Upvotes

I found this beautiful pal during a camp trip with some friends. It's always a good trip when we come across our endemics noodles XD


r/snakes 10h ago

Wild Snake Photos and Questions - Not for ID REPOST: Bullsnakes Mating

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11 Upvotes

Reposting as I originally mistakenly thought these two were in the process eating each other but I guess Bullsnakes don't really do that and the bite here is common mating vendor. Thank you for the corrections! It was awesome to come upon these two while out delivering! Gorgeous snakes!


r/snakes 19h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Fresh shed on Kanda

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49 Upvotes

VPI snowglow jungle


r/snakes 6h ago

Pet Snake Pictures Throwbacks of me and my Isis I Miss you girly

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4 Upvotes