Baby garter ate another baby

[The Snake Whisperer]

I've never seen any of my Easterns of any age try to eat another snake. Lately I've been experimenting with foods & feeding and found out that I can set a dish of beef canned cat food slices in a community cage and the snakes don't fight over the food at all. In fact, they seem to sort of take turns eating, a few snakes at a time. I was so amazed because I'd fed snakes separately until having so many snakes to deal with this summer, that it was becoming too laborious a chore to try to feed them all separately.
I have snakes sorted into cages according to size and condition (all were rescued because they were injuried in various degrees of severity and would have died if I hadn't rescued them. I will write another thread about this situation too.
I supervised all the community feeding experiments constantly, mostly because I was so fascinated by the snakes behaviors. The more I've watched Easterns interact, the more I'm convinced that contrary to science thinking snakes are solitary creatures, Eastern garters are social and prefer the company of other Eastern garters. In the wild, I rarely ever encounter just one Eastern garter snake. Many times I've come across a group of adult females lined up a foot or two apart along a small stream of water in the field after a hard rain, clearly all looking for food and resembling a group of fishermen lined up with their buddies on a bridge!

[ConcinusMan]

My concinnus don't normally try to eat other snakes or each other but when they go crawling through fish, another concinnus will mistake them for food and attack and try to swallow the other snake.

So, there's other reasons this can happen. It doesn't always have to be cannibalism and it doesn't always have to be that the snake was out to eat another snake. Sometimes it's just a case of mistaken identity.