A male red-sided garter snake. He survived the winter by hibernating
underground where the temperature never dropped below zero .The weak sun
persuades more males to emerge. They’re cold and can’t move fast, yet they are in
an urgent race. The first males to warm up will have a head start when the first
females appear. Meltwater provides the first drink they’ve had for six months.
At last, a female has emerged. The warmest males will inevitably be the first to
react to her smell. She will only mate once, so competition between them is
intense.
This male has overslept.
He will need hours to warm up. At the moment, he stands no chance of mating.
Most of the other males are ready to chase females, but curiously some leave
the race and go to join the cold male.
They slide their warm bodies over him, just as they would if they were courting
a female
More and more males crowd around him. Why?
Their relative temperatures show what’s going on. His cool body showing as blue
is quickly warming as it absorbs heat from the other males. He’s a trickster.
He’s fooled the others by giving off a scent just like a female’s and they are
trying to mate with him. He only needs a few minutes of this to steal enough heat
from his rivals to catch up and join the chase. Every spring, tens of thousands of
garter snakes fight it out in this mating frenzy.
It is, in numbers, the greatest gathering of reptiles in the world
