The Maligned Cottonmouth
The vast majority of “cottonmouth” sightings are cases of mistaken identification. Many people in the eastern U.S. tend to assume that most snakes are cottonmouths, but this just isn’t so.
Cottonmouths, also called Water Moccasins, are perhaps the most unjustly maligned animals in North America. These snakes do everything in their power to avoid issues with people, but somehow they have an infamous reputation among serpents. It is ingrained in the American psyche that cottonmouths are deadly, mean, and aggressive.
They supposedly chase people, lie in wait to drop in boats, collect in huge “nests,” and many other myths. People believe these statements so firmly that merely remarking that cottonmouths are not aggressive can be enough to enrage some people. So feared are these little animals that people regularly claim to have narrowly escaped with their lives from cottonmouths in states where they do not even occur.
Oddly enough, there are no reports of this behavior from the multitude of professionals that regularly encounter these snakes in the wild. If these animals were as fearsome as everyone claims, one would expect that there would be at least a little bit of empirical evidence of these behaviors. On the contrary, published scientific accounts regarding cottonmouths paint a very different picture. One notable example is that of biologists…
