No surprise then to witness the relief felt when the little iguana slipped through the snakes’ constricting coils and escaped to safety. The two subspecies are the eastern and western racers, the latter being larger, longer, and darker than the former. It is a mildly venomous constrictor but it is not considered aggressive or harmful to humans. Throughout history we’ve presented the snake as a symbol of evil and danger. The Galpagos racer is a colubrid snake in the genus Pseudalsophis that is endemic to the Galpagos Islands. After all, we are most often afraid of the things we don’t understand and struggle to anticipate. It is perhaps because snakes’ eating habits, appearance and movement is alien to us that we fear them. Once prey is consumed, the snake may not eat again for several weeks. As ectothermic – or cold-blooded – animals, reptiles only require around a tenth of the food intake of a similarly-sized mammal to survive. Evolution has instead led them to consume their prey whole, digesting bones and all. Unlike mammals, snakes don’t chew their food and have no appendages with which to carve up a share of their quarry with their kin. A constrictor by nature, it is relatively small little more than 1m long when fully grown and only mildly venomous. Collectively, the actions of these snakes can appear terrifying, but once a snake eats it loses its desire to hunt again. The Galápagos racer snake is, like the marine iguana, an endemic. It is a mildly venomous constrictor but it is. The time of year when these iguanas hatch is for these snakes the equivalent of Black Friday bargain hunting – it’s every snake for itself, because if they miss out here, they’ll go hungry. The Galpagos racer is a colubrid snake in the genus Pseudalsophis that is endemic to the Galpagos Islands. Rather than capturing a coordinated attack from snakes hunting as a pack, the clip from Planet Earth II actually shows a number of snakes acting individually, on instinct. Galpagos penguin Galpagos racer snake Galpagos sea lion Lava lizard Mangrove finch Marine iguana Medium ground finch Sally Lightfoot crab Small. And rather than hinder my career, my stand attracted BBC producers with better judgement, and eventually led to me presenting my own primetime BBC One wildlife series, Rhys Jones’s Wildlife Patrol.īut while it worked out well for me in the end, the same cannot be said for the racer snake, which has already been roundly and colourfully attacked. A couple of days later, though, I received another call telling me that the documentary had been poorly thought out and that a decision had been made to cancel the production. I remember thinking that that would be the last chance I’d ever have to work for the BBC, but also feeling that I’d made the right decision.

Galapagos island racer snake