A queen snake is very particular with its habitat. It’s found in areas with clean running streams and watersheds with rocky bottoms. And that’s because it has a very specific diet: crayfish. Newly-molted crayfish, to be precise.
Signal crayfish are invasive across Europe, but are native to North America. A crayfish’s shell is usually too hard for predators to crack into, so the queen snake instead waits for the creature to shed its shell and expose its body, when it becomes “as soft as a boiled egg”.
Freshly-molted crayfish look very similar, but the queen snake has a special trick to identify them: its sense of smell.
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Top image: a queen snake in North Carolina, United States. Credit: Patrick Coin (Patrick Coin), CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons