From Camouflage to Chemical Weapons

Tactics and Countermeasures in the World of Herpetology

I – Camouflage• Timber rattlesnake coloration allows it to

blend into background, such as forest litter

• Smooth green snake sways as a vine in the breeze.

II – “Deployment of Troops” armor, & parachutes

Armor – Strength of a tortoise shell• armor plates of the shell

inside the shell (note: the backbone)

• An average gopher tortoise shell (found in U.S.) is strong enough to support the weight of a 180 pound man.

Parachuting

• Flying frog – jumps from rainforest trees, spreads legs and opens toe pads to control descent.

• Draco volens – the flying lizard

• flying gecko

• flying snake – these rain forest snakes can flatten their bodies and leap into the air. They can even wriggles their bodies and seemingly gain lift to travel greater distances.

Flying snake in mid flight

Flying snake landing

III – Breathing under water

• The spiny soft shell turtle has a nose shaped like a snorkel. The turtle can breathe through the tip of its nose. (It also has many capillaries in the lining of its mouth, skin and cloaca, that absorb enough oxygen to allow it to stay underwater for long periods)

IV – Night vision

Infrared heat image of an elephant

• Pit vipers – snakes that have heat sensitive pits.

They can even sense the heat of theirprey along a trail

Timber rattler eating a rat

• Snakes use their tongue to collect chemical information about their prey. The fact that they have a bifurcated tongue and two vomeronasal (Jacobson’s) organ may indicate that snakes have more detailed images of the chemical around them.

•Natrix natrix grass snake

V -Communication

Tree frogs – Vocal sacspine barrens frogtree frog vocal sac

spring peeper vocal sac

• Alligators can produce a load bellowing sound. They can also produce infrasound that can travel great distances in the water. This is helpful in thick, overgrown areas such as swamps, where regular sound waves are muffled.

This alligatoris positioning

itself toproduce a

loud bellow.

VI – “Psy-ops” – Deception

• Decoy tank used during WW II

• Rubber boa constrictor – orients its tail where its head should be to fool attackers

• Break-away tail –The mole skink has fracture planes in a tail that is colored to draw attention to it. It will break off and wriggles in an attacker’s mouth, while the skink gets away.

• The hognose snake will pretend that it is a ferocious viper.

• It that doesn’t work, it will twitch, vomit, roll around in the vomit and soil, and finally roll over onto its back and open its mouth as if dead.

MIMICS• WHICH SNAKE IS DEADLY POISONOUS?

The one on the right is the deadly coral snake. The one on the left is the scarlet king snake ---a mimic.

“Red touch black, friend to Jack. Red touch yellow, kill a fellow”

VII – Biological weapons

• Komodo dragon – kills with its septic saliva containing approximately 40 different species of disease-causing bacteria. The komodo dragon contains protein defenses to the bacteria that act like antibodies.

VIII - Chemical Weapons• Snake venom – not only immobilizes prey,

but contains digestive enzymes to aid in the breakdown of swallowed food.

• Longest venomous snake – bushmaster

• Snakes produce neurotoxins and hemotoxins. The spitting cobra can squirt venom in your eyes. The venom has smaller molecules that can get through the eye membrane and actually poison you from your eyes and kill you.

• The California newt, that lives in the redwood forest, produces a very toxic poison about 10,000 times more deadly than needed to kill predators. One of its predators, the western garter snake is fairly tolerant of the poison. The increase in the toxicity level of the poison may be a sort of arms race with the snake.

• The newt’s toxin “TTX”, tarchatoxin or tetrodotoxin is also found in Japanese puffer fish, as well as crustaceans, mollusks and echinoderms. (If you survive the first 24 hours after exposure to the poison, then you will probable live.

• A researcher was killed by just handling the newt with a small cut on his hand. A camper was killed, after accidently brewing coffee in a pot into which a newt had climbed and was boiled.)