Instead of being seen as a nuisance, Macquarie University professor of evolutionary biology Rick Shine said they were actually a real asset, keeping vermin levels down.
His new research into the benefits of snakes to farmers and graziers suggested their presence on agricultural land far outweighed the potential costs.
Put simply, it was in farmers’ best interests to change their attitudes towards snakes and to tolerate rather than kill them, he said.
“The obvious cost of having venomous snakes like brown snakes around is that they can bite you and you can die.
“But the reality is that very few people in Australia die from snake bites.”
Browns abundant
The study, for which Professor Shine was the lead researcher, was published in the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) journal Animal Conservation late last year.
It was suggested brown snakes could be “incredibly abundant” but not often seen because they spent much of their time underground.
“We did some field work where we had 100 snakes per square kilometre in farmland. That’s a hell of a lot of brown snakes,” he said.
“We had transmitters on snakes, so we knew what they were doing and they’re basically wandering around in those burrows catching mice, and they don’t actually come out all that often.
“[If] each of those brown snakes is eating two or three mice per week you start multiplying those numbers and you end up with several thousand mice per year being taken out per square kilometre.
“That can actually have a big impact on agricultural productivity.”
Professor Shine said snakes were “fantastic natural rodent control officers” because of their access to mice burrows.
“If you’re just killing mice on the surface, you’re probably getting the adult males that are wandering around looking for girlfriends and so on,” he said.
“But a brown snake can go almost anywhere a mouse can go, and so they’re getting rid of the females and the young ones and so on as well.”abcnews