10/05/2026
The eastern indigo snake eats rattlesnakes, copperheads, and cottonmouths alive, is largely immune to their venom, and was nearly wiped out by people who were hunting the same snakes it eats.
It is the longest native snake in North America. Males reach 8.5 feet and 11 pounds. It is glossy blue-black from head to tail, harmless to people, and not venomous. It does not constrict. It overpowers prey with its jaws and swallows it alive and head-first, including other snakes as long as itself.
In November 2023, Georgia DNR wildlife technician Matt Moore was surveying for indigos in Long County in southeast Georgia when he caught a four-foot female crossing a field. She was short for an indigo but unusually thick. Moore measured her, tagged her, and placed her in a cloth bag to weigh. When he opened the bag, three snakes were inside. The indigo had regurgitated a young rat snake and a juvenile eastern diamondback rattlesnake, losing about half a pound in the process.
Moore moved the two expelled snakes to a table. Both appeared dead. An hour and a half later, the rattlesnake was crawling. It had survived being swallowed whole, held inside the indigo's stomach, and vomited back out. Moore noticed a bulge in its body. The rattlesnake had eaten a large mouse before the indigo ate the rattlesnake. It managed to keep its meal down after being swallowed and regurgitated by the indigo, Moore said. Three weeks later, trail cameras at the release site photographed a diamondback with a matching head wound and identical dorsal pattern. It was still alive.
The indigo snake that eats rattlesnakes shares a home with them too. Both species shelter in the burrows of the gopher tortoise, a keystone species whose underground tunnels house more than 350 other species across the Southeast. For decades, rattlesnake roundup hunters poured gasoline into gopher tortoise burrows to drive rattlesnakes to the surface for capture. The fumes killed or crippled every other animal inside, including the indigo snakes denning in the same tunnel system. People hunting rattlesnakes helped destroy the one predator that hunts rattlesnakes for a living.
The eastern indigo has been federally listed as threatened since 1978. It survives mainly in southern Georgia and peninsular Florida. It disappeared from Alabama entirely. The last verified wild sighting in the state was in the 1950s.
In 2010, Auburn University and a coalition of state and federal partners released 17 captive-raised indigos into the Conecuh National Forest in southern Alabama. The morning after the first release, the first snake the tracking team located was eating a three-foot copperhead. Jim Godwin, the zoologist coordinating the project, had been working toward the reintroduction for years. The snake had been on the ground less than 24 hours and was already doing exactly what the species was put there to do.
As of 2022, two wild-born juvenile indigos have been found in Conecuh, the first evidence of successful reproduction in Alabama in over 60 years. Florida has released more than 200 into the Apalachicola Bluffs preserve since 2017.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Georgia DNR / Matt Moore / Auburn University / Jim Godwin, Alabama Natural Heritage Program / USFWS / US Forest Service / CNN / Newsweek / Discover Wildlife.
