Mating group of Red-sided Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis), Narcisse Snake Dens, May 5, 2014.
- Spring is here, and the garter snakes (Thamnophis) are busily mating away — and that means mating balls where as many as a hundred frenzied males may be trying to woo a single female snake. That frenzy may be harder on the males than the females: a new study found that telomere length — associated with stress — decreased with males as they aged, but did not do so with females. [Proc. R. Soc. B]
- Then again, it could be worse: a photographer caught a female Green Anaconda (Eunectes murinus) in the act of constricting and eating its mate.
- Speaking of constriction. Kingsnakes (Lampropeltis) are known for eating other snakes, and they’ve also been known to eat snakes longer than they are — including other constricting snakes. They do it by constricting harder — twice as hard as rat snakes. [Journal of Experimental Biology]
- Ontario has banned the hunting of Common Snapping Turtles (Chelydra serpentina), a species that had previously been regulated as game wildlife (with seasons and bag limits). Conservationists have long argued that any take is unsustainable, and they’re right: turtles simply reproduce too slowly, and face too many other dangers (roadkill, nest predation) — they’re simply in too much trouble already.
- In other good news, the Arizona snake shot — allowing snakes to be shot within city limits — bill died in a tie vote in the state senate.
- Researchers at Grand Valley State University are monitoring a population of Eastern Massasaugas (Sistrurus catenatus); they hope to learn more to fight the onslaught of snake fungal disease, which is hitting the massasauga particularly hard.
- Oh, great: the purported medicinal properties of the Indian Sand Boa (Eryx johnii) has led to a spate of poaching and smuggling, putting the species, which is protected in India, at greater risk of extinction.
- India is also home to the unusual shield-tailed snakes (Uropeltidae), which Andrew Durso calls the “Darwin’s finches” of snakes.
- This January a rare species of boa, Corallus cropanii, endemic to Brazil’s São Paulo state, was found alive for the first time since it was described in 1953. It’s otherwise known from only a handful of specimens.
- Cobra venom is largely neurotoxic — it shuts down a prey animal’s autonomic nervous system — but some cobra venoms have cytotoxic, or tissue-destroying, qualities, most famously the venoms of African spitting cobras. Cytotoxins are painful but not as lethal as neurotoxins, so you’d think that cytotoxic venoms in cobras developed as a defense mechanism. But it turns out that cytotoxins don’t correlate with spitting, but with spectacular hoods: the more brightly banded or coloured a cobra species’ hood, the more cytotoxins in the venom. [Toxins]
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