i love snake!!!!!!!!!!!!1

If the word snake pops into your mind in social situations, you're probably not thinking of a legless reptile.

Indeed, the prevailing opinion among animal behaviorists for years was "very dogmatic that snakes weren't particularly social," says Harry Greene.

"They courted, they mated, and that was it.

Mothers abandoned the babies." Although Cornell University herpetologist Greene describes himself as a "total snakeophile," he says, "I was as blinkered as anybody else:

But his view began to change one morning in 1995.

"I was sitting in my house in Berkeley reading the newspaper when the phone rang" he begins.

It was David Hardy, a retired Arizona anesthesiologist who worked with Greene on radio tracking black-tailed rattlesnakes.

"His voice was practically quivering," Greene remembers. Hardy described a rare sighting of a rattler, accompanied by newborns.

Even more surprising, the mother and young ones would remain together for more than a week.

The behavior of this radio-tagged mom, known to the scientists as superfemale 21, started Greene and Hardy toward revising their view of snake parenthood.

They focus on pit vipers, the group that includes rattlesnakes and their relatives.

Suddenly, old anecdotes and a rare study or two scattered throughout the literature became relevant.