The Scoop On Snakes!
Why are snakes important?
You might be asking yourself why you should care about snakes, and what makes them so important. Well, you'd be surprised at what these creatures can do. Snakes are important because they play a vital role in providing biodiversity to our environment. Biodiversity is important because it provides both use values for humans and intrinsic values in themselves. Snakes can also benefit humans economically, as many people acquire snakes as pets or for their skins.
In addition, snakes provide vast benefits to humans in their predatory role in controlling populations of small rodents, birds, and amphibians. In other words, they work to take care of all of those furry, disgusting, little rodent friends that we just LOVE so much, right? Right.
Why should YOU care?
Snakes are an important part of our community. They are very beautiful creatures, and reptiles are a very diverse group. They contribute greatly to the biodiversity in the area. Biodiversity is important, not only for their use values, but also for their intrinsic values.
Why Should You Care?
Snakes play a vital role in numerous food webs, which includes controlling rodent populations in and around the community, which emphasizes their importance to the local ecosystem. For example, the Eastern Milksnake has been very helpful to farmers by hunting around old buildings in search of mice within old foundations and walls before they have an opportunity to destroy valuable crops. Additionally, snakes don't just manage destructive rodent populations. They may also act as keystone species in their native habitat.
What is a keystone species?
A keystone species or umbrella species is a species that plays a critical role in maintaining ecological processes in a community, and its impact is greater than what would have been exptected based on their relative abundance.
Moreover, these species often cast an "umbrella" over the other species by being more or equally sensitive to habitat changes (The Encyclopedia of Earth 2009). http://www.eoearth.org/article/Umbrella_species?topic=58074
Often, umbrella species require larger amounts of land and a wide variety of habitats. Accordingly, conservation measures that work to protect these species could benefit a large number of other species and assist in larger-scale biodiversity conservation efforts.
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It is very likely that, because of the important role that snakes play in managing prey populations and the larger ranges that some snakes inhabit, that many snake species may act as umbrella species important to conservation. Therefore, their importance to the community may extend past those that involve just prey management. Conserving large, undisturbed upland and wetlands often used by snakes could lead to the conservation of numerous species, including many other reptiles and amphibians.
An example of a keystone species is the Eastern Indigo Snake (Drymarchon couperi) These snakes act as umbrella species for a variety of wildlife inhabiting the same types of land (Hyslop 2007). As a result, conservation of habitats used by these Indigo snakes could potentially save other sympatric species, including other herpetofaunal species as suggested by Roberge and Angelstam (2004).