Whether a wild cottonmouth snake will attempt to strike in an encounter depends on its baseline stress level, according to a team of scientists led by undergraduate researcher Mark Herr.
"Most people think a snake is more likely to strike after you have handled or harassed it," said Tracy Langkilde, professor and department head of biology. "Our results show this is not true. We show that how stressed a snake gets when handled or harassed does not determine how likely it is to strike."
The researchers found that cottonmouths with high baseline levels of corticosterone, a hormone that is used to estimate the amount of stress an animal experiences, were more likely to strike during an encounter with a person than were cottonmouths with lower baseline levels of corticosterone. Surprisingly, an increase in corticosterone levels that occurred after a standardized stressful experience did not make the snakes more likely to strike.
Only eleven of the thirty-two snakes in the experiment struck after being held by snake tongs on their first encounter. After a short period of stressful confinement, just seven of the snakes attempted to strike when held by tongs. These results, recently published online in the journal, General and Comparative Endocrinology, suggest that cottonmouths are not as aggressive as popular lore suggests and that the level of aggression a cottonmouth displays during an encounter may often be exaggerated
Read more at:
http://phys.org/news/2016-12-stressed-snakes.html#jCp