Get rattled! LA Zoo has new baby snakes as part of endangered species program

Two litters of a rare southwestern rattlesnake were born at the L.A. Zoo last month. The six New Mexico ridge-nosed rattlesnake pups are the first to be bred under a multi-agency recovery program that started two years ago. 

The shy, gray-and-tan snake lives in isolated mountain ranges in Arizona, New Mexico and Northern Mexico and is considered “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

" Conservation … isn't just about protecting the animals that look most similar to us or that are the easiest to like,” said Byron Wusstig, the L.A. Zoo’s reptile curator. “It's about preserving that ecosystem as a whole.”

The L.A. Zoo is one of three institutions working to breed the snakes so their offspring can be released back into the wild as part of Project Obscurus (the rattlers’ scientific name is crotalus willardi obscurus). This year’s litters are the first zoo-bred pair in the project and the result of pairings made about a year ago. The pups’ parents were collected from the mountains of Sierra San Luis, Mexico, for breeding.

What's life like for the snakelets?

Unlike most egg-laying reptiles, rattlesnakes give birth to live young and “hang out” with the neonates for the first few weeks of life. Wusstig said the baby ridge-nosed rattlesnakes have been basking in the light on top of their mom and sipping water that beads up on her scales. The pups snack on centipedes in addition to bite-sized pieces of the mice and quail that adults eat.

“There is a bit of parental behavior that happens with rattlesnakes that we still have a lot to learn about, but it's really interesting to observe,” Wusstig said.

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Luc Myers

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Courtesy LA Zoo

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In the coming months, Project Obscurus will decide whether these snakes are released back into the wild or remain in the breeding program.

“Success won't be measured by how many individuals we can breed here in the zoo,” Wusstig said. “Ultimate success is getting the populations in the range where they're most threatened in Arizona and New Mexico, getting those to have sustainable populations … that are genetically diverse and stable in the long term.”

Can I see the babies?

The zoo’s ridge-nosed rattlesnakes are quarantined to prevent them from picking up illnesses that could spread to wild populations once they’re reintroduced to their native environment. However, the zoo has several other species of rattlesnake that you can safely observe from behind panes of thick glass.