Are there snakes in ireland

And most reptiles that lived in Ireland were killed by the cold that ensued during the last Ice Age, over ten thousand years ago. If you have cold blood running through your veins you need warm weather to function and to survive.

The last Ice Age killed any opportunity whatsoever for reptiles to find heat of any kind, as the isles were covered in ice and the coldest weather imaginable. Before the Ice Age happened, it is believed that a land bridge existed between the European mainland and the British Island. And another land bridge existed as a passage between the British Island and Ireland. But the window of opportunity was not the same for those two bridges.

When the glaciers melted, marking the end of an era, both bridges were drowned. The bridge between the Irish and British people disappeared eighty-five hundred years ago. But the bridge between European land and British territory was available for another two thousand years. That means that animals of any kind had more time to go to Britain and get accustomed to the lands there than they had for any Irish opportunity. Researchers believe that is why Britain has had three kinds of snakes during its history and Ireland none at all.

They just had more time to get on their respective bridges before the end of the Ice Age drowned any other possibility. This means that even though reptiles could have gone from Europe to Britain and from Britain to Ireland they never got the chance or never had the need to do so as there are no snake fossils in Ireland.

Even if there are no snakes in Ireland, a snake fossil would have proved that snakes did indeed exist there once. The British people, on the other hand, has three different types of snakes living in their homeland. But how come in hundred of thousands of years no snake ever crawled its way towards Ireland? Before the melting glaciers killed any possibility to walk -or if you were a snake, crawl- from Europe to Britain and then to Ireland, before the Ice Age could have killed any reptiles there, it is believed that everything was connected by land.

How come no snakes ever decided to go to Ireland, even in the remotest of times? If that was the case, we could find the snake fossil in Ireland to prove that sometime in the past a snake enjoyed the Irish view. The answer to that question is fairly simple.

It is because Ireland was underwater for a long time. There was no way that a snake could have found his way into the Irish land if it was under the ocean. If you want to go at it chronologically, you can have a look at it in this way. At first, Ireland was buried underwater. There have been numerous reports of large pet snakes escaping or being released. As of yet, no species has managed to take hold in the wild—a small miracle in itself.

Have you got a Big Question you'd like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions mentalfloss. He became a priest in the Christian church and decided to bring the religion to the pagans in Ireland.

There is some thought that the snakes were a metaphor for paganism, which he, in fact, did drive out of Ireland, especially the Druids, through conversion to Christianity. The serpent was important to the Druids for healing purposes, among others, and the ancient symbol of the serpent circle in which the snake devours its own tail symbolizes the never-ending circle of life.

Snakes have historically been associated with evil. Most people are deathly afraid of them. Films about giant snakes preying on people, or someone being thrown into a snake pit are the stuff of nightmares. Unlike the legends about them though, snakes are mostly beneficial, especially to gardeners. Garter snakes, for example, feed on worms, rodents, ants, grasshoppers and crickets, as well as other garden pests. They play a very important role in the food chain due to their expert ambushing techniques that allow them to prey on such elusive pests as grasshoppers.

Striped racers are one of several species of snakes that live in the Sierra Nevada. Some of the others include the rattlesnake, rubber boa, gopher snake, king snakes, garter snake and many others. Of these, only the rattlesnake is venomous. They can sense the slightest vibrations in the earth around them and tend to hide from oncoming footfalls.