Reptile Facts

rhamphotheca: The Gila Monster (Heloderma suspectum)

… is the only venomous lizard in the United States. Their fearsome claws are used mostly for digging (they spend the majority of their time underground or otherwise out of the hot desert sun) and climbing, rather than hunting. Eggs make up the largest portion of their diet, as well as baby birds and mammals, and the reptiles have a keen sense of smell to track them and other prey items down. They are binge eaters, eating large amounts (up to a third of their weight) all at once, followed by a prolonged fast; they may only eat five or ten times a year.

Their tail acts as fat and water storage, like a camel’s hump, helping them survive long periods between meals. Unlike snakes, Gila Monsters are unable to inject their venom, instead relying on capillary action and the clenching of the jaw muscles to draw the venom out. Because they are slow movers and hunt mostly helpless prey, the venom most likely serves a primarily defensive role - a hypothesis also supported by their aposematic salmon-and-black warning coloration. However, while you still don’t want to be bitten by one, a Gila Monster’s venom is unlikely to kill you - with improved treatment techniques, there have been no reported deaths as a result of a Gila Monster bite since 1939.

Photo by Jason on Flickr

(via: Peterson Field Guides)

stuckinabucket:

This googly-eyed little bastard is the blunthead tree snake (Imantodes cenchoa).

It lives in Latin America and can’t do anything without looking ridiculous.  A case in point:

It’s nocturnal, lives in understory shrubs, sleeps in bromeliads, and, unlike its cousin the twig snake, isn’t venomous unless you’re a small frog.

Above: Ridiculous-looking death in a tube.

Below: “Pathetically inoffensive to humans.”*

If you grab it, its primary defense will be to stink at you, because that’s dignified.  To give you an idea of how tiny this thing is, here is a jumping spider thinking of trying its luck.

They live off a diet of frog and lizard eggs, small frogs, and lizards about the diameter of a human finger.  Females can take slightly bigger prey, since their heads tend to be a smidge bigger than males’. 

Nobody’s really done a lot of research on the whys of their itty bitty teeny little bodies, but the skull size and shape is under extreme evolutionary pressure to stay big enough to support prey consumption and sharp vision, while snake ribs and vertebrae are pretty flexible, allowing the rest of the body to essentially collapse into a camouflage-friendly profile when not digesting food. 

We do know that their organ position means that their bodies are significantly backweighted, with their center of gravity clocking in at 74% of their nose-to-ass length** (technically their Snout-Vent Length, which is slightly more hilarious but also slightly more obscure if you’re not a herpetologist, because most people don’t go around calling an asshole a vent).  The backweighting does give them way more maneuverability in the head section, which helps when you’re grabbing small, quick things like frogs and lizards and I guess can’t hurt when you’re eating their unborn young, either.  Like, you can strike the eggs fast and hard like a ninja and pretend there’s some honor in it or something.

Also, there’s some advantage to being so unbelievably long and skinny that this is possible:

At least if you tend to live in short, shrubby trees.  See, if you have x amount of biomass, and you spread it out over 3-5 feet, like these little bastards do, instead of concentrating it into one normal-looking snake, you’re much less likely to find yourself unsupported by vegetation.  And I don’t mean that like, the vegetation won’t believe in you.  I mean, the vegetation will dump you on your ass if you slither across it as a normal snake. 

Skinny Minnie up there has much better odds of being able to scoot across a few twigs and leaves without them giving, and the greater length means that it can anchor itself at multiple points along a path.  It also requires less strength to remain erect while stretching over fair distances.

Above: Too goofy-looking for words.

*Quote apparently from the field notes of Alejandro Arteaga, a particularly judgmental herpetologist.

**Data but not color commentary from International Journal of Morphology, 24(1):43-48, 2006.

[The line drawing appears to be the work of the authors of “Imantodes cenchoa (Chunk-headed snake) Mating” in Herpetological Review 36(3):324, 2005, but artist attribution isn’t specifically stated, because science journals.]

There isn’t much I could add to this …

(via ody-ssea)

unknown-endangered: What is a snake?

Snakes are reptiles of the order Squamata. They are all carnivorous and kill their prey by either envenomation or constriction, although most are non-venomous and harmless to humans. They occur on nearly every continent apart from Antarctica, but are notably absent from Ireland, Iceland, and New Zealand. Snakes are believed to have descended from lizards during the Cretaceous, a theory supported by the boas and pythons, which have vestigial hind limbs, called spurs. 

The anatomy of snakes is adapted to life in trees and underground. Climbing trees and burrowing is actually easier for snakes when not impeded by limbs. They have multiple ways of moving in different situations, such as sidewinding seen in snakes living on the unstable sand dunes of deserts. The internal organs are also modified, usually elongated and paired organs are placed one in front of the other instead of side by side. In many snakes, one lung is reduced, and in some species, one lung is lost entirely.

Contrary to popular belief, a snake’s jaws don’t dislocate when feeding, but instead are simply highly mobile. The lower jaw is separated into two halves, which can move independently of each other. This allows them to move in a “walking” motion when feeding on a large prey item, as they lack any other way of manipulating food.

All snakes reproduce using internal fertilisation, with the male inserting one of two hemipenes into the cloaca of the female. Most are oviparous, and lay eggs, with some species providing parental care until they hatch. The boas, however, are ovoviviparous and produce eggs that develop inside the female until hatching, who then gives birth to live young.

Photo: My bb Scarlett the common boa (Boa constrictor imperator).

Thiel’s Pygmy Chameleon (Brookesia thieli)

Originally posted by worldlyanimals, photograph by Blepharopsis

(Source: Blepharopsis.deviantart.com, via worldlyanimals-deactivated20121)

rhamphotheca: Eastern Indigo Snake

North America’s longest snake is the Eastern Indigo Snake (Drymarchon couperi); males can reach 8 ft (2.5 m) or more in length. Found through much of the southeast, these nonvenomous snakes live in different habitats depending on the season. In the winter they prefer sandhill habitats, where they den in gopher tortoise burrows (sometimes cohabiting with the burrow’s owner). In the spring they shift to their summer breeding locations in riparian and wooded creek bottoms. When startled or threatened they’ll flatten their neck, hiss and rattle their tail, but they’re actually fairly docile and don’t often bite.

Photo by W Pierson on Flickr

(via: Peterson Field Guides)

rhamphotheca:

A Long-lost relic from the Eastern Ghats: Morphology, Distribution and Habitat of Sepsophis punctatus Beddome, 1870 (Squamata: Scincidae) [2013]

Sepsophis punctatus (Beddome 1870), the only species of a monotypic genus, was described based on a single specimen from the Eastern Ghats of India. We rediscovered the species based on specimens from Odisha and Andhra Pradesh state, India, after a gap of 137 years, including four specimens from close to the type locality.

The holotype was studied in detail, and we present additional morphological characters of the species with details on natural history, habitat and diet. The morphological characters of the holotype along with two additional specimens collected by Beddome are compared with the specimens collected by us. We also briefly discuss the distribution of other members of the subfamily Scincinae and their evolutionary affinities.

DATTA-ROY, A., MOHAPATRA, P.P., DUTTA, S. K., GIRI, V.B., VEERAPPAN, D., MADDOCK, S.T., RAJ, P., AGARWAL, I. & KARANTH, P. 2013. Zootaxa. 3670 (1): 055–062.

http://mapress.com/zootaxa/2013/f/z03670p062f.pdf | http://dx.doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.3670.1.4

(via: NovaTaxa - Species New to Science)

allcreatures: 

Keepers at the Mountain Zoo in Germany are celebrating after successfully breeding Roti Island snake necked turtles (Chelodina mccordi) for the very first time. The species is considered to be extremely endangered and hails from Rote Island, which is south west of Timor and north of Australia. The newborns are currently around 3cm long but will grow to around 24cm

Picture: Rex Features (via Animal photos of the week - Telegraph)

animalworld: PUERTO RICAN EMERALD ANOLE (Anolis evermanni)

© Alfredo Colon

Kudos to the Puerto Rican Anoles, for proving smarter than scientists previously believed and representing for the Lizard family’s ability to learn

Manuel Leal and Brian Powell at Duke University in North Carolina tested the problem-solving skills of the Puerto Rican anole, by setting up a platform with two different colored capped wells—one empty and the other containing a worm.

The biologists found that the lizards not only developed solutions to the problem, but needed three fewer tries than birds to pass the test.

“They’d put their snout under the little plastic chip and then quickly bump it,” explained Leal in a press release. “They don’t do this in the wild.”

The lizards learned that the cap’s color signified whether it covered their worm reward. However, when the caps were later reversed, two of the lizards managed to unlearn the association and started bumping away the new cap.

Of note as well is that Birds get six chances per day to learn to flip the cap correctly, but anoles eat less, which means each lizard in the study only had one daily opportunity to figure out how to pass the test and needed to retain that information from day to day.

Fact Source: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/science/lizards-ace-test-designed-for-birds-59021.html

Other photos you may like:

Gold Dust Day Gecko

Spiderman Lizard

Anole Lizard earring(?)

(via moreanimalia)

rhamphotheca: Recently Discovered: Eco-Activist Snake

This snake’s scientific name, Sibon noalamina, has a green goal. “No a la mina” means “no to the mine” in Spanish. In the snake’s native range in western Panama, mining threatens to destroy sensitive highland rainforests. The no-to-the-mine snake doesn’t pack a venomous bite, but its coloration may mimic some species of deadly coral snakes.

(via: Discovery News)                    (photo: Sevastian Lotzkat)

princeowl: New Mexico whiptail (Cnemidophorus neomexicanus)

The New Mexico whiptail lizard is a crossbreed of a western whiptail which lives in the desert and the little striped whiptail that favours grasslands. The lizard is a female-only species that reproduces by producing an egg through parthenogenesis. Despite reproducing asexually, and being an all female species, the whiptail still engages in mating behavior with other females of its own species, giving rise to the common nickname “lesbian lizards”. A common theory is that this behavior stimulates ovulation, as those who do not “mate” do not lay eggs.

(via blackbackedjackal)

astronomy-to-zoology:

Alligators typically have a snout shaped like an upside-down U, while crocodiles have a upside-down V shaped snout. Alligators also don’t have their lower teeth exposed while crocodiles do. Also and probably the most important thing is that there only are two species of alligator (The American A.mississippiensis, and the Chinese A.sinensis ) and they both have a limited range that is not shared with other major species of crocodile (one exception in Florida).