Snake Facts for the Lunar New Year

Celebrate New Year New Year with 7 snake facts

By Allison Parshall Edited Dean Visser

As the new moon rises this week, it enters a new year Moon Calendar Many cultures use the east and southeast of Asia. In the 12-year-old Moon Cycle of Chinese Zodiac, it is the year of 2025 Snake, an animal that symbolizes wisdom and changes.

These unlimited reptiles can be found in every populated continent, thank you Evolutionive “Big Bang” about 125 million years ago. There are more than 3,000 snake species, and among them they have a huge variation. Some animals are smaller than the earth’s white, others are longer than a pickup truck. Some are harmful to humans, others are venoms. And the ecological roles they play as a driver of critical pests and nutrient cycles are often underestimated. As we look forward to the year, let’s give us some appreciation for our odd friend.

Shiny snakes

To help Science Journalism

If you enjoy this article, consider entering award-winning journalism Subscribe. By purchasing subscription, you are helping to ensure the future of stories about the discoveries and ideas that are conformed to today.

Snake signature is the movement. But they can launch inches or herself Position of jumping or strike. A few years ago scientists found a strange snake movement: “Lasso locomotion. “Researchers were testing the ways to keep the trees away from the bird’s bird’s nests. They put a wide metallic cylinders, which expected to avoid snakes, along with the normal polo or tree trunk, with the normal” concert locomotion “.

Instead, the team found that the snakes were placed in the knots to overcome fences. The reptiles would meet once the tail around the fence and then link the tip around the body. This created a kind of lasso that can be slowly but effectively used slowly but effectively.

Thermal view

Pythons, Boas, Pit Vipers and more can hunting the whole darkness. In addition to being the smell of predators, they warm up the quarry. These snakes allow these to “see” this heat organs; organs Act as a thermal camera, which allows reptiles to access at home at a target.

The pit organs are a tongue covered with membrane of a snake nose. Infrared radiation generated from potential prey heats the membrane and this changes the small electrical charge that rides across the external surface of the membrane. Voltage change passes to nerve cells, which send information to the brain.

Roomy

The serpent is generally not chewing food. Instead, prey whole swallowed and slowly digested during the days. Burma Piton, for example, can give a whole week to digest a single meal. While eating smaller mammals such as rodents, these Pythons are also comparatively consumed by enlargers and horrible deer. They can be four times broader than the dislike mouth.

This spectacular feat descends to a few long skin and a hundred. The opposite of the popular belief is that the snakes do not consume large prey of their jaws. The lower jaw, consisting of two half-free semicolons connected to a long-distance, the design that allows the lower jaws to facilitates the sides. Burma pythons can be spread especially due to the flexible extra tissue in their jaw.

Venom Grooves

There are more than 3,000 snake species, and more than 600 of them are scary. These snakes are Cold-efficiency shaped Venom to deliver maximum load capture. This adaptation evolved several times, each time they start with the tops that are anchored by snake. In Veninos, these peaks were longer, finally becoming groove, the gland turns the slot that allows you to go to the waves and the right prey.

Double anatomy

Snakes “external reproductive organs come in pairs. Males have two penises, and females have two clicks. In women, these bodies have long been wrong for smells of glands.

It is called hemismo, the male bodies are usually kept inside the body and expelled from the outside, as the hemipules are outside the body. In some snake species, double pens are covered in spikes or hooks.

Prehistoric giants

Today’s longest snake species is reduculated in Python, usually reached 13 to 16 meters long. In rare cases, they can have 20 or 30 feet.

But they seemed to them, compared to a million species of snakes that slipped millions of millions ago. Last year Researchers published the discovery Vasuki indicus, A snake was 47 million years ago, 36 and 49 meters. 27 Fossilized footprints were found 20 years earlier in a coal mine in Gujarat, India. Initially these bones took over these bones from a prehistoric crocodile species.

By length calculations Vasuki indicus, The Hindu folklore would appoint Vasuki Royal Snake, which would put it Titanoboa cerrejonensis, Another titan between 60 million years ago, his fossilized footprints were found in Colombia.

Python invasion

A few years ago Florida became illegal to keep the Burmumuso Python pet. That’s because these snakes have become invading creatures in Everglades, in which they have reduced populations of many native mammal species. The population of these pitos that are located in southeastern Asia, flew or fell by pets. In 1992, for example, Andrew Hurricane destroyed a Python breeding center and many snakes came out in the desert. In the last decade, Florida fish and fauna services have had the annual competition called Florida Python Challenge. The winner last year caught 20 reptiles and a $ 10,000 reward.

These giant snakes, which are usually between six and nine meters long, can be very difficult despite growing numbers. The key key is hidden in the natural pores of the Swiss cheese-shaped local bed. Researchers once Found 12-meter python Following the GPS neck of an opossum, he became the snake’s dinner.

Everglades now despite the strong territory of Python, there is more hope Florida keys farther away from the south. “We’re still at the beginning of the beginning at the beginning,” says Michael Cove, Carolina Natural Sciences in the North Carolina Museum’s research curator. “There is a capacity to manage before it’s too late.”