Beware of Live Copperhead Snakes Inside Fish: Fact Check

Story: 

Fellow Anglers, Beware of Live Copperhead Snakes inside Fish.

Other Versions

1. Fellow Anglers beware. Several snake bites this season have came from baby copperheads found alive inside of feeding fish. With the top water bite happening now the snakes get more oxygen to prolong there life inside the fish while the fish continues to feed. Makes the want to have bass thumb a little less desirable.

2. Caught a bass earlier with a live snake creeping inside it’s mouth.

3. Bass eating snake pic.

4. Oddest thing you found in a catfish’s stomach.

Fact Check:

Various stories attached with a strange picture claim to show and warn Anglers that Copperhead Snakes are living inside mouth of Bass Fish and that they have caused several poisonous bites. It is not a fact, thankfully.

Origin of Picture: Live Snakes Inside Fish

The picture of the Snake inside the Fish mouth has been around online for sometime now, and is often shown as a Bass fish eating a Snake. The warning to anglers that Copperhead Snakes are living inside mouth of Bass Fish originated from a Facebook post on 3 Sep 2015. The picture can be seen in a 2009 forum post on website forum.gon.com, which says the picture has been copied from website Outdoorlife.com, where some reader had caught the bass fish and sent the snake inside it:

Guys I can’t take credit for that one. I copied the pic from Outdoorlife.com. Some reader had caught the bass and sent it in…

We can see the picture shared in a June 2009 picture gallery of Outdoorlife.com website; where there are 3 other pictures of snake inside a fish mouth (see above). The current picture comes with a description that identifies Ricky Stephens as the angler, and more importantly, the fish being largemouth bass and the snake — a Garter:

Snake In The Bass
Okay, we’re half completely grossed out and half fascinated by Ricky Stephens photos of a largemouth bass he caught that swallowed—or rather half-swallowed—a garter snake.

To Conclude

So that suggests that the snake seen inside the largemouth bass fish mouth is not a Copperhead but a Garter. Although venomous, the garter snakes are generally not aggressive and their bites are rarely fatal. Moreover, they are seen in a variety of different habitats, but less inside water. Coming to the warning on Facebook post, as confessed by the user Michael Patrick in one of his comments on the post, the story is made up by him simply to give the interesting photo a viral lift.

In short, the picture showing a live snake creeping inside a fish mouth is not real and a staging scene. So, the warning to anglers about the dangers of it is a fabrication.

Hoax or Fact:

Hoax.