Hide or die when the winds bring wings: predator avoidance by activity shift in a mountain snake

Background: Understanding predator-prey relationships is fundamental in many areas of ecology and conservation. In reptiles, basking time often increases the risk of predation and one way to minimise this risk is to reduce activity time and to stay within a refuge. However, this implies costs of lost opportunities for foraging, reproduction, and thermoregulation. We aimed to determine the main potential and observed predators of Vipera graeca, to infer predation pressure by estimating the incidence and the body length and sex distribution of predation events based on body injuries, and to assess whether and how the activity of V. graeca individuals is modified by predation pressure.

Results: We observed n=12 raptor bird species foraging at the study sites, of which Circaetus gallicus, Falco tinnunculus and Corvus cornix were confirmed as predators of V. graeca. We found injuries and wounds on 12.5% of studied individuals (n=319). The presence-absence of injuries were significantly positively influenced by the body length of vipers, and were more frequent on females than on males, while the interaction of length and sex showed a significant negative effect. The temporal overlap between predator and viper activity was much greater for the vipers’ potential activity than their realised activity. Vipers showed a temporal shift in their bimodal daily activity pattern as they were active earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon than could be expected based on the thermal conditions.

Conclusion: The time spent being active on the surface has costs to snakes: predation-related injuries increased in frequency with length, were more frequent in females than in males and occurred in shorter length for males than for females. Our results suggest that vipers do not fully exploit the thermally optimal time window available to them, likely because they shift their activity to periods with fewer avian predators.

Keywords: prey capture, thermoregulation, basking, Serpentes, thermal niche