Mike Thalman is a businessman, but his real passion in life is snakes. It began when he was six years old and an enormous bull snake intercepted the path of the family car. His father slammed on the brakes, stopped, and ushered it across the road. The snake was marvelous to look at—high-ridged scales with a saddled pattern of brown and yellow and a tail ringed with black and cream. Father and son watched it slide into the bush.

Thalman was hooked. As he got older he became the go-to snake man for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. He handled requests for snake removal and studied timber rattlesnakes with a university group in his spare time.

One day in 2008, he had a thought: What if he took his snake outreach online? “The whole idea was basically a ‘Snake 911,’” Thalman says. “Someone who didn’t know anything about snakes could post a picture and instantly, or within a couple minutes, get a 100 percent ID on the snake.” He created a group on Facebook and gave it a simple name: Snake Identification.

Thalman was vaguely aware of other online communities that helped people identify wildlife, but he wasn’t involved in any of them. He didn’t have a blog or a website. He had no experience doing online outreach or moderating forums. He had no idea what to expect.

Nearly a decade later, he operates an online community that is 60,000 members strong—larger than the population of his hometown of West Des Moines. Every day, hundreds of people post photos of snakes, and Thalman and a team of experts make an identification. Most of the time, it takes less than a minute.  Like 911 dispatchers, the group’s 19 administrators and seven moderators are on deck 24/7. They even have an “on-call” schedule. None of them are compensated for the time they spend running the group. One admin recently had to take a several-week mental-health break from the page and its constant flood of requests and sometimes-confrontational members. Volunteering is a huge commitment, and most admins admit that they would rather be in the woods than on social media every day. Their dedication has a lot to do with how much snakes are adored by people like Thalman, and how much fear they inspire in most of the people they share backyards, parks, and (occasionally) bathrooms with.

These are tough times to be a snake. The International Union for Conservation of Nature findsthat 28 percent of reptiles are currently threatened with extinction. Though snake populations are notoriously difficult to assess, in the United States alone there are 14 snake species listed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service as threatened or endangered. A 2010 study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters found snake populations across five countries in widespread decline. The authors outlined a slew of factors influencing this fallout, including habitat destruction, reduction in prey availability, and climate change.

Group admin Andrew Durso is a professional herpetologist who tackles snake science on many fronts. He does research, authors peer-reviewed scientific publications on reptiles and amphibians, and runs a blog called “Life is short, but snakes are long.” Despite all that other work, he says, “it almost seems like the best thing I could do for snake conservation and education locally, and maybe the world in general, is to spend time on Facebook helping people identify snakes.” The staggering quantity of people reached through the group—during the peak snake months in spring and summer they average one snake identification every seven minutes, 24 hours a day—might change more minds than any journal article.

The timber rattlesnakes that Thalman grew up tracking in Iowa use the same rocky outcrops as dens every year. A person could go dig up a few boulders and destroy an entire population of timber rattlesnakes if they wanted to. He has seen dens demolished to make way for limestone quarries and housing development, watched bull snake populations plummet, and timber rattlesnakes get listed as a protected species in Iowa. With the Snake Identification group, Thalman hopes to protect the animals he and his "Snake 911" team care so much about. “We do it out of passion. We want these snakes to be around for our grandkids to see, and to understand them for the purpose they’re here for,” he says. “Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

Many of the group’s volunteers are professional biologists and herpetologists. They are, arguably, vastly overqualified for a gig that mostly involves identifying common colubrids like rat snakes, worm snakes, and garter snakes. But unexpected snakes do show up. After Hurricane Irma ravaged the southeast this month, photos appeared on the Snake Identification page of cottonmouths, corn snakes, and hognose snakes that had been displaced by the storm. One visitor posted a photo of six black “snakes” that washed up on her beach and found they were in fact amphiumas—snakelike in shape but definitively amphibian.

Another was less relieved when she found out the harmless “rat snake” she thought she had spotted among storm debris on a walk with her children was a venomous timber rattlesnake. “Best admired from a distance,” a moderator cautioned. On one particularly tense thread, the group hurried to identify a snake for a doctor in India, who needed to know the species in order to administer the proper antivenom. The group gets international requests every day, so it ensures that the team has international snake expertise.

Inevitably, the snake trolls show up, too. One memorable user repeatedly requested IDs for marginally snakelike whales and worms. Another staged a mutiny, posting a long rant about his dissatisfaction with the page and enticing members to follow him to his “new” Snake ID group. Now there’s a long list of rules pinned to the page, and repeat violators are quickly given the boot. “We have to run it like a small city,” Thalman says.

A greater problem than the snake trolls, though, is moderating snake experts who join the group to help the administrators with identifications but end up berating people who post photos of a snake they just killed. Kevin Messenger, one of the group’s administrators, says the goal is for the group to operate like an interactive field guide. “If a person had this dead snake and they opened up a book, the book isn’t going to yell back at them and say, ‘Oh what the hell, you shouldn’t kill it,’” he says. “It’s just going to tell you about that snake.”

Not shaming snake killers is also better when it comes to changing behavior in the long term, says Andrew Durso, another administrator. “You’re not going to change your behavior if you don’t feel comfortable and you feel ostracized or put down.” The group’s efforts, says Durso, have made Snake Identification “one of the most civil places on the internet.”

Still, it can be hard to be engaging over the internet with a stranger, compared with in-person conversation. “When I give a talk in person, I can almost guarantee, if there’s somebody out there who didn’t like snakes, I could usually convince them by the end of the day,” says Messenger. “Whereas here, on this group, you will run into people that are adamant.”

But the group does change minds. Case in point: member Megan Ahaszuk. She grew up outside of Tuscon, Arizona, on land thick with venomous rattlesnakes. She learned early in her childhood that part of protecting the family meant killing the snakes unfortunate enough to wind up on the property. “I didn’t really know anything about them,” she told me, when I contacted her through the Snake Identification group. “Just that they were bad.” When she learned to drive, she mimicked what her dad always did and ran over any rattlesnake she saw on the road in residential areas.

Ahaszuk joined the group last year out of curiosity. Gradually, she went from a passive observer to the kind of commenter who can tell the subtle differences between a western diamondback and a Mojave rattlesnake. Now when she sees a snake in the road, she, like Thalman’s father, steps on the brakes.  

When Kristi Murray joined, she felt anxious in the woods because of a persistent fear that a snake might drop onto her from a tree. Snake Identification cleared that up: Snakes are shy and have no intention of attacking from the trees. A year later, Murray looks forward to finding them in her yard. When her family found a Dekay’s brown snake recently, they spent 10 minutes marveling at it and taking photos—not even touching it for fear of hurting it. “Imagine that,” Murray wrote. “We were concerned for the snake’s well-being!”

The Snake Identification group does help scientific research, too. Administrators encourage all posters to upload their finds to HerpMapper, a citizen science project that allows anyone to add their observations of reptiles and amphibians to a worldwide database. This database is used by scientists to track wild populations and to see how species are being affected by human impacts like climate change.

The Snake ID Group was recently approached by a team in Switzerland working with Doctors Without Borders to develop a rapid snake identification tool to help doctors treat venomous snakebites. The team needed a large database of snakes that had been correctly identified to train the algorithm to automatically identify a given snake, Durso says, though he adds that a working prototype of the project is “still a long way off.”

Projects like Snake Identification are important, says David A. Steen, a professor of biology at Auburn University, because it can lead people to be more sympathetic to conservation. “The first step is to increase knowledge,” says Steen. “And in many cases with snakes, people are terrified. You’re not going to get people on board to conserve local populations of snakes if they’re terrified of the garter snakes in their backyards. So that’s where you start.”

With that said, Steen is not involved in the group. Instead, he patrols Twitter, looking for hashtags like #WhatsThatSnake, #SnakeID, #Snake, and #Copperhead. Steen prefers Twitter because it allows him to be a little nosy. Someone who tweets “Saw this #copperhead #snake in my garage” isn’t necessarily expecting a PhD biologist to tweet back “Harmless northern water snake #notacopperhead,” but that’s what Steen says makes the platform so valuable. Twitter allows him to engage people that weren’t even looking for help to begin with.

Social media often gets criticized for being an “echo chamber”—for being a place where people can surround themselves with like-minded folks and shield themselves from new information. Conservation-minded researchers like Steen, Messenger, Durso, and the many administrators and moderators of Snake Identification are using social media very differently—as a tool to break out of the ivory tower and share their passion for wildlife with people they would have never met in person. For too many years, says Steen, science communication and outreach has relied on people reaching out to scientists when they had a question. “I think that’s just asking too much of people,” he says.

“The rise of these groups on Facebook, on Twitter, on various social media—it really goes to the people where they are,” adds Steen. “I’ve seen a lot of scientists and researchers get online, do absolutely nothing to let people know they’re there. Then they’ll say, ‘Oh, what an echo chamber.’ Well of course it’s an echo chamber, because they haven’t put any effort into doing it.”