Pilot makes emergency landing after he finds a slithering cobra under his shirt

A pilot flying a small plane in South Africa with four passengers aboard felt a "cold sensation … underneath my shirt at my hip area," and thought it was a leaky water bottle. Until he glanced to his left and saw a venomous cobra head making its way underneath his seat. — Read the rest

Why was this 14-foot reticulated python slithering around Long Island, New York?

As one might suspect, reticulated pythons aren't native to Long Island, New York. And yet when the state's Environmental Conservation officers (ECOs) responded to a call about an odd snake on the side of the road, that's exactly what they found. — Read the rest

Even without ears on the outside, snakes can hear sound

Contrary to popular belief, snakes can hear and react to airborne sound, according to a new study.

The researchers played three different sound frequencies to captive-bred snakes one at a time in a soundproof room and observed their reactions.

“Because snakes don’t have external ears, people typically think they’re deaf and can only feel vibrations through the ground and into their bodies,” says Christina Zdenek from University of Queensland’s School of Biological Sciences.

“But our research—the first of its kind using non-anesthetized, freely moving snakes—found they do react to soundwaves traveling through the air, and possibly human voices.”

The study involved 19 snakes, representing five genetic families of reptile.

“We played one sound which produced ground vibrations, while the other two were airborne only,” Zdenek says. “It meant we were able to test both types of ‘hearing’—tactile hearing through the snakes’ belly scales and airborne through their internal ear.”

The reactions strongly depended on the genus of the snakes.

“Only the woma python tended to move toward sound, while taipans, brown snakes, and especially death adders were all more likely to move away from it,” Zdenek says.

“The types of behavioral reactions also differed, with taipans in particular more likely to exhibit defensive and cautious responses to sound.

“For example, woma pythons are large nocturnal snakes with fewer predators than smaller species and probably don’t need to be as cautious, so they tended to approach sound,” Zdenek says.

“But taipans may have to worry about raptor predators and they also actively pursue their prey, so their senses seem to be much more sensitive.”

The findings challenge the assumption that snakes can’t hear sound, such as humans talking or yelling, and could reshape the view on how they react to sound.

“We know very little about how most snake species navigate situations and landscapes around the world. But our study shows that sound may be an important part of their sensory repertoire.

“Snakes are very vulnerable, timid creatures that hide most of the time, and we still have so much to learn about them.”

The research appears in PLOS ONE. Damian Candusso, a professor at Queensland University of Technology is a coauthor.

Source: University of Queensland

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To explain piebald pythons, study pets and lizards

New research with pythons and lizards identifies a gene that results in white blotches, or piebald coloration, in reptiles.

Much of what we know about skin coloration and patterning in vertebrates generally, including in snakes, is based on lab mice. However, there are limits to what mice can tell us about other vertebrates because they don’t share all of the same types of color-producing cells, known as chromatophores. For example, snakes have a type of chromatophore called iridophores that can generate iridescent colors by reflecting light.

To gain a better understanding of the genetic basis of coloration in vertebrates, researchers combined a range of techniques—whole gene sequencing, gene-editing, and electron microscopy—to look more closely at color variations and patterning in the skin shed by ball pythons bred in captivity.

They were able to identify a particular gene (tfec) that plays a crucial role in reptile pigmentation generally and more specifically in a classic color variant found across vertebrates and distinguished by blotches of white, the piebald.

The sale of captive-bred reptiles is a $1.4 billion industry within the US alone. Over 4.5 million American households keep reptiles, and close to one in five of these are snakes bred in captivity. Due to the spectacular color variations produced through captive breeding, an individual ball python (Python regius, originally found in West and Central Africa) can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

“Ball pythons show incredible variation in skin coloring and patterning, which is part of their appeal for hobbyists, but also makes them really useful for researchers who want to understand the genetic basis of coloration,” says Rowan Barrett, interim director of McGill University’s Redpath Museum and the senior author of the paper in Current Biology.

“The pet trade has created a huge pool of color variation that would not have existed otherwise. This provides a catalogue for us to figure out the many ways that genes produce the amazing diversity of colors, spots, and stripes we see across different animals.”

To identify the genes that control a particular trait, scientists look for genetic variants that are present in animals that have the trait and absent in animals that don’t. Using shed skin collected from snake breeders, Barrett’s team found that piebald snakes carried the same mutation in the tfec gene.

But a common problem for scientists is that finding a correlation between a gene and a particular trait, such as the piebaldism, does not imply causation. To make that functional link, the McGill researchers collaborated with Doug Menke’s lab at the University of Georgia to modify tfec in a different reptile species, the brown anole lizard, using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. They found that genetically modified lizards do indeed show altered coloration, proving that mutations to tfec cause changes to color-producing cells.

“Our research advances knowledge of the genetics of vertebrate coloration generally and particularly of the development of iridescent cells, which haven’t been studied as much as other color pathways” adds Alan Garcia-Elfring, a PhD student in McGill’s biology department and the first author of the paper.

“It also highlights the potential benefits of working with non-academic communities like ball python breeders to accelerate discoveries in fundamental science. Our job, at this point, is to figure out what other mutations underlie all this variation seen in captivity, and how these mutations interact. It’s an exciting time for both researchers and reptile hobbyists.”

Source: McGill University

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