North of Winnipeg, 75,000 Snakes Just Woke Up and Started Going to Town on Each Other

Follow Highway 7 north out of Winnipeg long enough and you will come to Narcisse, Manitoba, a small hamlet that you do not want to visit.

See, this weekend, in the Narcisse Snake Den — a small cavern the size of a living room — a “slithering carpet” of 75,000 snakes are waking up from winter hibernation, and they’ve got one thing on their minds: getting laid.

Here’s some footage — just be warned, though, you can’t un-see this:

Over the winter, the snakes amass in the limestone caverns outside Narcisse, trying to survive the harsh Manitoba climate. When it’s warm they emerge and begin their giant nasty-ass snake orgy.

As it turns out, though, actually getting some is not an easy feat. At times, the males can outnumber the females 10,000 to one.

“Imagine trying to find a slightly bigger piece of spaghetti in a colander of spaghetti, and it’s moving,” Dr. Bob Mason, a reproductive biologist at Oregon State University, told the New York Times.

This will sound glib, and I do not want to conflate the very real tragedy of Fort McMurray and this strange/disgusting ecological phenomenon, but WHAT IN THE ACTUAL F**K is happening in the Prairies right now?