Tomas Klacek wrote:Great pictures and finds, love it! Aesculapian snakes are very rare here so it´s always nice to see some. I´ve never seen a snake longer than 150-160cm, some of yours looks massive!
Thanks Tomas!
The question about the size of the aesculapians is very good, but unfortunately I'm not used to measure the snakes... and this is a bad habit.
When I was younger, I found a DOR aesculapian near my hometown, which I judged as being huge. It was in fact a very big male (I think to remember so. However males are the only ones that can attain these sizes... or am I wrong?), and that was one of the rare times I measured a snake, bringing it home: it was just a little above 150 cm... Less than I supposed to be by sight, but the snake looked anyway impressive!
Then, years later, I found another huge DOR aesculapian in the northern Apennines: it was not very "thick", but extremely long. It was at the border of a trafficked road, and I didn't measure it... who knows how long it actually was...
I never measured the aesculapians in Cres, but I can tell you that the biggest ones were almost surely these two snakes.
- First specimen: in situ
- First specimen: in hand
- Second specimen: notice the thickness
- Second specimen: notice the length
How long could they be?
I don't know, but I would say that a length between 150 and 170 cm could be a reasonable one...