Picture this: You’re a young, banded water snake, enjoying life in Lakeland, Florida. You spend your nights hunting and swimming in rivers and marshes, and your days sunning yourself on riverbanks, or dangling peacefully from branches over the water. It’s a pleasant existence. Quiet. Except for once a year, when sections of the park you live in get cordoned off, and you and all your snake friends slither out into the open to take part in a massive, days-long orgy.
According to Live Science, water snake mating season is upon us, and for the past few days, the freshwater coasts of Florida have been covered in piles of happy water snakes going at it as hard as they can. Although the NSFSW (not safe for snake work) sight has alarmed some passersby, there is no need to fear: Officials from the City of Lakeland Parks and Recreation department assured residents in a Facebook post that the snakes were “nonvenomous,” adding that they are an important part of the ecosystem and “should not be disturbed.”
“Once the mating is over they should go their separate ways,” officials wrote.
In order to prevent people from disturbing the water snakes’ yearly fuck fest, city officials in Lakeland have put up signs and caution tape to make park-goers aware of the snakes’ presence. “This is for the protection of the public and the snakes.”
How do snakes do it, you might be asking yourself. Well, according to HowStuffWorks.com, when a female snake is ready to mate, she’ll release a pheromone — like me, applying Marc Jacobs Daisy perfume in college before going out for the night. If a male catches of whiff, he’ll come and find her, and court her by “bumping his chin on the back of her head and crawling over her.” If she’s into it, she raises her tail, and he wraps his tail around hers so that their cloacas meet. This can last anywhere from under an hour, up to a whole day. Presumably, the orgy version of this is similar, except you can’t always tell whose cloaca is whose, and sometimes one snake gets sort of pushed out, and has to negotiate how to reinvolve themselves again.
Mating season should be over soon, and then this summer, according to Live Science, little baby water snakes will enter the world, and begin their blissful, enviable lives of swimming, sunning, and annual orgies. That’s the dream…