So last week I caught my first ‘black adder’; this beautiful female.

Having looked into melanism, Luiselli et al. (1994) suggest that although both males and females may be all black, it may be more common in females. Luiselli et al. (1994) suggest that melanism in the adder has a thermoregulatory advantage that allows the snake to grow more quickly and achieve a larger body size. This larger size offers an advantage to the females in that they can produce bigger clutch sizes and at the same time find birth less physically demanding (Luiselli et al. 1994).

Not a lot of people know that… but now we do…