Two cottonmouth snakes were filmed entwined in Alabama water; online commenters said the venomous pair were male rivals fighting, not mating

Cottonmouth snakes intertwined in the water near Birmingham, Alabama, have sparked an online debate over whether the venomous pair were mating or fighting over territory. Footage of the pair shared on Reddit's Snakes community shows them entwined yet almost calm, which led the person who posted it to suspect courtship. Fellow snake enthusiasts quickly disagreed in the comments, describing the encounter as a contest between rival males. The clip was recorded just south of the city, and the disagreement over its meaning has turned a strange sighting into a small lesson in telling territorial combat apart from courtship between snakes.Original poster watched the Alabama cottonmouths for ten minutes and found them together an hour laterAccording to The Cool Down, the original poster told Reddit's Snakes community they felt compelled to share the sighting and were fairly certain it was mating, while admitting they might be wrong. That hedge matters, because it left the thread open to correction. The poster later told commenters they had watched the pair for a good ten minutes and that the snakes were not being particularly aggressive with one another.The poster was working nearby at the time. After leaving to carry on with that work and returning about an hour later, they said the two were still together, doing what they could only describe as cuddling.Commenters dispute the mating claim and describe a territorial duel between two male cottonmouthsSoon after the footage appeared, commenters streamed into the thread to challenge the idea that the snakes were mating. The reaction was swift enough that the debate was well under way before the poster added their later observations. One commenter told the original poster the pair were two males in combat, while another told the thread it looked like a "territorial thumb war on water." The second remark is a joke, but it neatly captures the reading that took hold in the thread, a standoff between two rivals rather than a courtship.Reddit users amazed by male combat in water as one predicts a female is waiting to breed with the winnerOther commenters told the thread they were amazed that the territorial display took place in such an unusual location. One said they had never seen male combat in water and urged others to watch their step, because a female would probably be nearby, waiting to breed with the winner of the duel. Another commenter joked that it was possibly the first footage they had seen of naval combat between vipers. The mixture of astonishment and wordplay shows how the footage was received: as an unusual sight worth enjoying as much as analysing.Similar snake fights mistaken for mating were reported at Colorado's Garden of the Gods and in GreecePeople have made the same mix-up elsewhere, The Cool Down noted in May this year, at Colorado's Garden of the Gods, snakes taken to be mating were in fact battling for breeding rights. At Sitia Geopark in Greece, two males fighting over turf looked like an exotic mating ritual. The same article also pointed readers to a different kind of sighting in India, where a king cobra was filmed making an elegant glide along the shoreline.What the Alabama cottonmouth video shows about reading snake behaviour from an online videoThe episode shows how quickly an inaccurate description can be corrected when footage is shared publicly. The poster offered a guess and admitted uncertainty, other users supplied a competing explanation within the same thread, and the poster then added fuller observations of their own. Even though the original account was inaccurate, the pair's calm demeanour explains why the mistake was easy to make.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.