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Updated: May 2, 2025
Yet this was not all. Hanging at the end of a string in fact, now resting inertly against his cheek was the scarlet, black and yellow ringed body of a coral snake, the deadly elaps. Its head had been severed and lay upon the floor directly underneath.
The first genus is the Crotalus, or rattlesnake proper; the second is the Caudisona, or ground-rattlesnake; the third is the Ancistrodon, or moccasin, one of the species of which is a water-snake; and the fourth is the Elaps, or harlequin snake. There is some dispute over the exact degree of the toxic qualities of the venom of the Heloderma suspectum, or Gila monster.
Not at all dreaded by the natives; venomous, but not deadly, the bite merely producing a bad ulcer for a day or two. ELAPS MELANOCEPHALUS. Native name WERR. Dirty olive green on the back, from the neck to the tail; scuta 147, dirty reddish orange; head black from the nose to neck; sides of the head white; tongue forked. Doubtful if poisonous; little dreaded by the natives.
Experimenters wishing to secure the venom of the Elaps often find it difficult to rouse the snake to striking wrath. Very few instances are known of Elaps bite, but those few unquestionably set this ornamental creature in a class by itself, among American Ophidia, for "results." Out of eight well-authenticated cases of Elaps bite, six of the victims died.
Shun, as you would a rabid dog, a pretty little red-and-black banded serpent about as thick as your thumb. If any living creature whose habitat is the United States deserves the epithet "deadly," it is the Elaps.
Eland, development of the horns of the. Elands, sexual differences of colour in. Elaphomyia, sexual differences in. Elaphrus uliginosus, stridulation of. Elaps. Elateridae, proportion of the sexes in. Elaters, luminous.
It would be highly inadvisable to snatch a kiss from a copperhead or to stroke a tarantula's fur the wrong way. But one could do it and live to boast of the achievement. There are five varieties of venomous serpents in this country: three of them Crotalids, and two belonging to the Elaps family. The Elaps are rather rare.
Wallace believes, the innocuous kinds have probably acquired their colours as a protection, on the principle of imitation; for they would naturally be thought dangerous by their enemies. The cause, however, of the bright colours of the venomous Elaps remains to be explained, and this may perhaps be sexual selection. Snakes produce other sounds besides hissing.
But some of them, the cobras for instance, develop into what are on the whole perhaps the most formidable of all snakes. The only poisonous colubrine snakes in the New World are the ring- snakes, the coral-snakes of the genus elaps, which are found from the extreme southern United States southward to the Argentine.
Two species are known; the harlequin snake, which ranges throughout the Gulf states to Texas and up the Mississippi River to Ohio, and the Sonoran coral snake, found in the Southwest only. By a strange perversion of facts, while the harmless hog-nosed snake enjoys a repute of terror, the Elaps, most dangerous of all American reptiles, is commonly regarded as harmless.
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