Word: snakes
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Greene, who describes himself as "stuck on snakes," believes they deserve a better rep. A collector since he was a seven-year-old in rural Texas, he sees them as far more interesting biologically and aesthetically than even fellow scientists once thought, and his research on snake behavior has helped show why. "Snakes are natural puzzles, suggestive of things that haunt and inspire us," he writes in his new book, Snakes: The Evolution of Mystery in Nature (University of California; $45). At once a paean to serpents and an encyclopedic review of what's known and not known about them...
Guiding a dubious visitor through the double-bolted doors of the venomous-snake room at Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, where he is curator of herpetology, Greene emphasizes his point by plucking a yard-long Western rattlesnake out of its cage. "Touch his skin or feel his rattle," he says. "They're really works...
...Greene, the greatest achievement of the snake is how well it has adapted to its varied environments. Like sharks, which have a similar image problem, snakes occupy almost every available ecological niche except the polar regions, from rain forests to deserts to the sea. Probably descended from nearly limbless lizards that lived during the age of dinosaurs 90 million years ago, snakes are divided into some 2,700 species, ranging in size from pencil-long African thread snakes to gigantic 20-ft. pythons and anacondas that are big enough to swallow a human. To fit into a cylindrical body, their...
...hatchlings of some species exhibit survival strategies that might seem beyond their tiny reptilian brains. Young Eastern hog-nosed snakes, for example, feign death if they sense a threat. Are they consciously aware of danger? Or, as Greene puts it, "Does a mere serpent have reflections and intentions?" To learn more about snake behavior, Greene and his colleagues are going to plant tiny radio beepers inside newborn rattlesnakes. Says he: "Radio telemetry allows us to wonder more accurately what it's like to be a snake...
Most astonishing to Greene are snakes' keen senses--of smell, temperature and touch--which make up for their lack of external ears and limited vision (except for night snakes, which have catlike eyes). That flickering forked tongue, for example, loathsome as it may seem, actually gives the snake the chemical equivalent of stereoscopic vision; by responding to the relative number of odors on either side of the tongue, the snake can pinpoint potential prey, mates or enemies. Pit vipers, for their part, are equipped with keen infrared sensors near their nostrils, so even if blinded, they can strike a mouse...