Caught in Palmetto state park east of San Antonio. Never hooked him he just held on. Non-venomous, round pupils.

black rattling spitting mamba for sure!

For sure

Banded water snake. Very pretty snake, can be very aggressive too.

Be careful some Cotton mouth will have banding.

The old east texas motto of "when in doubt, shoot!" Applies every once in a while...

9094 has it identified correctly: a banded watersnake.

Almost all water snakes are aggressive. One of the least aggressive of the lot is, oddly, the water moccasin. They "flare up" and give a look like they mean nasty business . . . but I have seen Biologists try to make them strike their boots when they nudge them and they rarely can be provoked to strike. And, water moccasins have very unique body structures: blunt and thick bodied, relatively short snakes tapering very fast to a thin tail.

Agreed: their coloration can include variations including some striping but not to the extent of a banded watersnake.

Brad

Yea, they are like most crappie fisherman...HEY, get away from MY Treetop!!!! LOL

When I was an 8 year old, I was at a birthday party, where we planning on going swimming in the pond, that had a floating swimming dock in the middle....first kid that made it to the dock and jumped off...when he surfaced he had been bitten over 2 dozen times by water mocassins and was dead before he was pulled from the water...party over and lesson learned about mocassins...dont believe anything a snake biologist tells you about them being docile...it just isn't true most of the time.

Well, I won't call anyone out as anything is possible I suppose. But, just in general, the old story about multiple water moccasin bites leading to a death is one of the oldest of all yarns. They even used it in a scene in the movie, Lonesome Dove, as many of you will recall.

The oldest and most prominent version of this scare tale is the water skier story of someone falling off and getting bitten all over. Versions of it have been repeated endlessly. But, it has never happened.

I'll donate $100 to the Athens High School Fishing Club if anyone can produce a newspaper report of any such incident. After all, it would be newsworthy. And, by this I mean the actual finding of such a victim, not some witless reporter repeating it.

Here are two refutations below.

Brad



Silliness
Silliness 2

Right on Brad. I have heard similar stories since I was a kid many many years ago. I have never heard a confirm-able example of the multiple bite story.

Jump on a nest of those all balled up in the water and then get back with us...

This is the closest any of you will come to a "Nest of Water Moccasins" in the wild. What most refer to as a Ball of Moccasins is just a pair of mating moccasins.