Indigo Snake

Indigo Snake

Indigo snakes feed on vertebrates, including fish, frogs, toads, lizards, snakes, birds and small mammals. They are diurnal hunters and travel long distances in a day actively searching for prey. They are non-venomous and they overpower their prey, sometimes swallowing them whole and alive.

Close-up of Indigo Snake

This is an indigo snake dragging-off a rattlesnake to eat. They are immune to the rattlesnakes venom.

What these pictures can't capture is how the snake has an amazing purple red glimmer in the sunlight. An academic article in Science magazine "Origin of Iridescent Colors on the Indigo Snake" describes this as follows:

In the indigo snake, a pattern of undulating lines on the surface of the skin, formed by the junction of rows of cells, acts as a two-dimensional optical diffraction grating to produce the play of colors.

There are about 7 different known related species/subspecies in the genus of the Indigo - the Drymarchon, all scattered throughout the Americas, from the southern part of the US to South America. Among those species are the Yellowtail, Orizaba, Mexican Redtail, Eastern Indigo, Unicolor, Blacktail, and Margarita Island. The all have the bright shiny iridescence but the underside, head and tails vary in color as some of their names describe. The belly can be light brown, salmon, pink or dark.

The Indigo may be the longest snake in North America with some being as long as 9.2ft (2.8m) and in Central America they may be as large as 10ft (3m).

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