Bob Mount: Scary names don’t mean scary critters

I have always been interested in colloquial names applied to some of our native animals by country folks in and around areas where I grew up.

Some examples include the following. Praying mantises were called devil’s horses and, if molested, would spit with unerring accuracy into the eyes of the molester causing permanent blindness. In middle Tennessee, any skink possessing a blue tail was called a blue-tailed scorpion and was considered to be venomous. Another lizard believed to be venomous was the so-called barking scorpion. This was a large species, the broad-headed skink, which was adept at climbing trees. Skinks have no voice, and I was puzzled as to how this lizard got its colloquial name. Later in my life, a fellow herpetologist provided me with a reasonable hypothesis, “I suspect it’s because when climbing trees, they dislodge pieces of bark.”

I was once talking with an elderly country fellow about animals, and he said, “One of the strangest critters in these here parts is the changeable scorpion. It changes back and forth between green and brown.” He was obviously referring to the green anole, a.k.a. chameleon.

Dragonflies and damselflies were called snake doctors, and their presence meant there were snakes in the vicinity. In South Georgia, they were called mosquito hawks, a more fitting designation.
In at least one rural area in South Georgia, two species of fish, pirate perch and black crappie, have interesting names, assmechins and guvment perches, respectively. The first are small elongate inhabitants of sloughs and slow-moving streams that have a peculiar anatomical feature; the location of the fish’s anuses is under their throats. Guvment perches are so-called because a governmental agency stocked them, in the 1930s I’m told, in several streams in which they did not occur previously.

Several snake species have colloquial names because of characteristics or habits some believe, or formerly believed, them to have but are undocumented. There was a widespread belief that copperheads guided rattlesnakes to wherever they desired to go and were called “rattlesnake pilots.”

I suppose nearly everyone 50 years or older has heard about “hoop snakes,” which chase people by rolling like hoops and upon catching them, stab them with their poisonous tail spine.
Tall tales about hoop snakes are still in circulation, but in far fewer numbers than instances of water skiers falling into “beds” of water moccasins or people being chased by coachwhip snakes, caught, and whipped almost to death.

Spreading adder is a name most often applied to the eastern hognose snake, a ferocious looking, albeit perfectly harmless snake, once common but now scarce in our area. As youngsters we were told to hold our breath in the presence of a spreading adder because its breath was believed to be poisonous.

Bob Mount is emeritus professor of zoology and entomology at Auburn University and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.