Trophies.I'm posting this for Trixi, our very own Warrior Princess. Who could believe that tiny little dog could kill an adult coral snake (scary, poisonous, and most certainly pissed) and what may be a juvenile rat snake (not poisonous but has a nasty bite and also most certainly pissed)? In the same morning! Whew! I guess that silver tooth has given her super snake-killing powers.
The postscript to this event is that I convinced Kim to go back out to the field, brush the ants off the carcasses, bag them up, and stash them in her freezer! Ew, ew, and ew. I am still surprised she went along with this.
I have a professor friend at UT Austin, Chris Bell, a vertebrate paleontologist, who studies living species of snakes and lizards in order to better understand fossil species. He is particularly excited about getting his hands on the coral snake, head and guts intact, because he can study skull morphology (important in identifying snakes in the fossil record) as well as what it ate (gives us an idea of the kinds of environments that snakes live in).
Sometime in the next few days, I expect that Kim and Chris will meet up in some hot parking lot of some fast food joint somewhere in Austin and transfer the precious goods from her car to his!
Not only did Trixi make the field safer for all of us and our dogs, she's made a valuable contribution to science!
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