filter_framesUniversity of Michigan Museum of Zoology, Reptiles and Amphibians Predator and Prey Collection

The University of Michigan, Museum of Zoology’s Division of Reptiles and Amphibians maintains the second largest collection of preserved reptile and amphibian specimens in the world. Of the nearly half million specimens, nearly 40,000 specimens are snakes. PhD student Mike Grundler’s research involves characterizing diets of neotropical colubrid snakes through the dissection of fluid-preserved snake specimens in the UMMZ herpetology collection. During his work at the Research Museum Center, well over 500 specimens were dissected to recover nearly 200 prey items. Documenting these predators and prey items with high resolution photography is part of Mike’s ongoing research characterizing ecological patterns in the evolution of neotropical snake diets. Many of the dissections made proved fruitful in this respect by yielding further data on poorly known snake diets. At present, there are 459 images of snake predators (over 100 species) and their prey. The museum vouchers for these images are curated in our research collections.

Rights and Permissions

All the images in the collection are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC-BY-SA 4.0). This means you are free to share and adapt the images for any purpose, even commercially, so long as you provide attribution by giving appropriate credit, providing a link to the license, and indicating if changes were made. If you remix, transform, build upon the material, or otherwise prepare a derivative work, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. The license does not in any way limit your rights under copyright law, such as fair use. Please read the license before using this work. If you use photographs from this collection, please use the following attribution and copyright notice: "© 2018 Regents of the University of Michigan. This image was created by the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, Division of Reptiles and Amphibians. It is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license."