Originally posted by renlish:

The meat floats, the scales sink. Makes sense. If you want the scales, pull it to shore.

That part makes sense in isolation, but combined with their spawn conditions, behaviour and habit of evaporating like fairy gold at dawn the whole process of hunting for scales becomes wildly impractical.

It also makes no sense that dead creatures explode into dust and drop all their parts as neatly separated objects. If we're talking realism the scales should float because they're attached to a big ol' snake corpse.