Mark Sandfoss, 32, walks up and down the shoreline of an uninhabited island in the middle of the night looking for venomous snakes.
“Snakes are really cool and not dangerous,” he said. “They’re nice.”
In 2013, the UF zoology doctoral student began studying the relationship between waterbirds and Florida cottonmouth snakes on a small island in the Gulf Coast called Seahorse Key. But in April 2015, when all the birds disappeared, Sandfoss adjusted his study to figure out how the snakes, which depended on the birds for food, would survive.
“I had to switch a little bit to look how the birds leaving affects the snake population, which is actually a much cooler and interesting experiment,” he said.
After driving about an hour out from Gainesville, he takes a boat ride over to the island, a five-gallon paint bucket and snake hook in hand.
He first counts all the snakes and dead snakes he finds on the shore. He captures the live ones and checks to see if they have a microchip. By the end of the trip, he will take up to eight venomous snakes back to his lab at UF.
His adviser, Harvey Lillywhite, did the same thing 15 years ago, so Sandfoss uses the data to compare the number.
Sandfoss studies the snake by checking their body condition and water balance and tagging them. Through his research, he has found that the snakes have become skinnier and smaller since the birds left, which he originally thought would happen.
A year and a half after the birds disappeared, he’s finding more live snakes that are struggling to survive.
He said he believes they’re now eating rats, small lizards and an occasional washed-up fish on the island, along with turning to cannibalism.
“Snakes will not go extinct on Seahorse,” Sandfoss said. “They’ll find kind of a baseline level and survive.”
Sandfoss said he and other researchers do not know exactly how or when the freshwater snakes ended up on an island with no freshwater, or why they only ate the fish the birds dropped and never the bird eggs.
Coleman Sheehy III, the previous director of Seahorse Key Marine Lab and a member of Sandfoss’ graduate committee, said he’s impressed by Sandfoss’ work ethic.
“He’s taking good advantage of the rare opportunity,” Sheehy said.
Sandfoss said he plans to continue his research for at least another two years.
The next part of Sandfoss’ research is to implant tracking devices in the snakes to monitor their movements, but he still has to find a veterinarian willing to work on the snakes.
“Most people don’t like them,” he said. “But then when you get into it, snakes are just kind of crazy animals.”
Mark Sandfoss, a 32-year-old UF zoology doctoral student, holds up a Florida cottonmouth snake at Seahorse Key, Florida. Sandfoss is researching how the snakes are being affected by the loss of birds on the island.
