But did you know that there are three different methods of venom delivery? Some species of lizard, such as Komodo dragons ( Varanus komodoensis) and gila monsters ( Heloderma suspectum) have venomous saliva that they inject via chewing. Venom is a quite common method that reptiles, and particularly snakes, use to help secure food. It’s for this reason that a turtle that is constantly floating or having trouble surfacing is a sign of illness. While bladders are typically thought of as strictly for urine storage, some species of freshwater turtles multitask by using accessory bladders called cloacal bursae like the ballast tanks on a submarine! By taking on or expelling water, they can automatically adjust for their lung volume to make it easier to swim.
LOTS OF SNAKES CHASING A LIZZARD FULL
What do you do when you live in a dangerously hot environment full of loose sand? You dig into the sand to protect yourself from the heat - and as a bonus, it protects you from predators! Sandfish skinks ( Scincus spp.) have specialized anatomy that allows them to go well beyond simple digging: with reduced eyes, a sand-filtering respiratory tract, feather-like toes, and a strong tail, these little lizards are able to swim through loose sand much in the same way a fish swims through water! All the snake has to do is twitch the muscles attached to each pair of ribs, and suddenly their ribs start moving like tiny little legs! If you’ve ever watched a millipede walk, that’s how it works for snakes. So when a python needs to swallow the prey that it caught, it expands its lower jaw by dislocating the joint at the chin, and then uses specialized muscles to work each side of the jaw back and forth to swallow!Īnother by-product of not having legs is that snakes have invented an alternative method of getting around: instead of using legs, they use their ribs! Snakes have impressively flexible ribs that allow them to swallow large prey, but they also multitask as a method of locomotion. Bigger meals = having the calories to be able to survive long periods of fasting. To solve this problem, many snakes such as the Pythonidae family have evolved expanding jaws and a particularly stretchy stomach that enables them to eat larger prey. And while her parents have relented in allowing her to have a pet ball python, much of her work with wildlife is confined to the garage or outside.Did you know that, according to the Reptile Database, there are over 10,000 different species of reptiles? And over the course of the last >300 million years, this incredibly diverse group of animals has devised many clever and sometimes weird ways to make the most of their circumstances:įood is hard enough to come by when you’re a predator, and this becomes especially hard when you’re a predator that doesn’t have any legs to chase down prey. She estimates that in her short career, she’s rehabilitated about 15 to 20 birds and 20 to 30 reptiles. Eventually, she was able to release the snake back into the wild.įast forward five years and Rosell doesn’t flinch at the idea of holding a venomous snake, patching up an injured reptile or assisting with a necropsy. She got out needle and thread, sterilized it, stitched up the snake, kept antibiotic cream on the wounds and nursed it back to health.
One of her first snake rehabilitation efforts was an eastern water snake that was suffering from lacerations. “I’ve got so many different books on reptiles and birds,” Rosell notes. “I didn’t really have any way to look anything up, so I kind of just learned things as I went along.” In recent years, however, she has watched YouTube, consulted reptile channels like Snake Discovery and read a lot of books. “I didn’t have a phone, and I didn’t have a computer,” she says, explaining how she initially learned her craft by experience.
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