Image:r/snakes/Reddit
Because it left the thread open to correction, that hedge matters,.
The original poster told Reddit’s Snakes community they felt compelled to share the sighting and were fairly certain it was mating, while admitting they might be wrong, according to The Cool Down. The poster later told commenters they had watched the pair for a good ten minutes and that the snakes were not being particularly aggressive with one another. Cottonmouth snakes intertwined in the water near Birmingham, Alabama, have sparked an online debate over whether the venomous pair were mating or fighting over territory. Footage of the pair shared on Reddit’s Snakes community shows them entwined yet almost calm, which led the person who posted it to suspect courtship. Fellow snake enthusiasts quickly disagreed in the comments, describing the encounter as a contest between rival males. The clip was recorded just south of the city, and the disagreement over its meaning has turned a strange sighting into a small lesson in telling territorial combat apart from courtship between snakes. People have made the same mix-up elsewhere, The Cool Down noted in May this year, at Colorado’s Garden of the Gods, snakes taken to be mating were in fact battling for breeding rights. At Sitia Geopark in Greece, two males fighting over turf looked like an exotic mating ritual. The same article also pointed readers to a different kind of sighting in India, where a king cobra was filmed making an elegant glide along the shoreline.
