On the best nights, Goode’s team might bag up to 20 snakes. In a campus lab the next day, his students measure, sex, weigh, and mark them for recapture (using paint on their rattles and inserting tiny microchips under their skin), then return them to their site of capture. Goode’s central research question—how does the ongoing conversion of pristine desert to housing developments affect snakes?—posed something of a conservation paradox. Compared with snakes in more natural areas, the Stone Canyon ones are growing larger, producing more offspring, and expanding their ranges among the McMansions. It helps, perhaps, that most homeowners are absent during the hottest months.