Stay knowledgeable with free updates
Simply signal as much as the Science myFT Digest — delivered on to your inbox.
The author is a science commentator
There is one thing otherworldly about snakes. The slithering creatures function closely in faith, folklore and mythology: the serpent within the Garden of Eden that tempts Eve to eat forbidden fruit; Medusa, a snake-haired Gorgon cursed with a gaze that turns observers to stone; the Nagas, the half-human, half-cobra beings of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, who dwell in underground palaces.
The serpentine presence throughout world cultures might replicate their extraordinary selection in the true world. There are round 4,000 snake species, residing in oceans, lakes, deserts, forests and even underground. The longest species, reticulated pythons, commonly exceed six metres; the shortest, the 10cm Barbados threadsnake, seems like a curl of brown string.
In February, herpetologists from the US, UK, Australia, Brazil and Finland revealed essentially the most complete household tree of snakes and lizards to this point — and located it contained a “macroevolutionary singularity”, or a comparatively sudden, unexplained shift within the charge of snake evolution that started greater than 100mn years in the past and remains to be ongoing. The twists and turns of their evolutionary backstory are rising simply as different scientists are touting snakes as the brand new superfood.
This evolutionary burst, referred to as adaptive radiation, noticed snakes evolving as much as thrice quicker than different lizards, which allowed them to prosper after the asteroid affect that worn out the dinosaurs 66mn years in the past. The course of additionally produced the eye-catching traits seen at the moment: a number of searching methods, together with venom and constriction; the flexibility to eat poisonous prey corresponding to scorpions; versatile skulls for devouring massive animals; the capability to “smell” chemical substances with the tongue; and the flexibility to glide, burrow, climb and swim.
University of Michigan biologist Daniel Rabosky, senior creator, described the serpentine tempo of evolution in Scientific American: “Lizards are puttering around on a moped, while snakes are on a bullet train.”
Together, snakes and lizards belong to the order of scaly reptiles often known as squamates, containing about 11,000 species and making up a few third of all terrestrial vertebrates. To complicate issues, there are limbless lizards, corresponding to sluggish worms, that aren’t snakes (not like snakes, they’ve eyelids, ear openings and notched, moderately than forked, tongues). While many lizard species have barely modified for the reason that time of the dinosaurs, snakes have since been capable of colonise new niches by evolving alternative ways of transferring, consuming and sensing the setting.
The researchers used, appropriately, a two-pronged methodology to look at snake evolution: first, sequencing the genomes of round a thousand squamate species to build a spine of the household tree and utilizing this to position different squamate species; and second, finding out their diets. There are few direct observations of the animals eating within the wild, so the researchers additionally examined the abdomen contents of greater than 60,000 preserved snake and lizard specimens saved in museums around the globe.
Crunching the genomic and dietary information advised that three broad modifications occurred comparatively shut collectively in snake evolution, leading to a cut up from different lizards: our bodies lengthened and misplaced limbs; skulls turned versatile; and chemical sensing turned extra refined. It appears to have been this trio of modifications, moderately than any single innovation, that triggered evolutionary success. The analysis, printed in Science, highlights the worth of amassing and preserving pure specimens — scientific practices that may really feel antiquated within the digital age.
Charles Darwin famous the same singularity within the fossil report with the sudden look and diversification of flowering vegetation. Darwin was pissed off by the puzzle, describing it in 1879 to his eminent botanist good friend Joseph Hooker as “an abominable mystery”.
The propensity of snakes to adapt rapidly to altering environments makes them, for some observers, the proper meals supply for a climatically unstable world. Snake meat is excessive in protein and low in fats, and already a delicacy in south-east Asia and China.
Farmed pythons will be consumed wild rodents and waste protein from agricultural processes; the animals can attain weights of greater than 100kg. One examine printed this yr discovered that, by way of changing feed to protein, “pythons outperform all mainstream agricultural species studied to date”.
Still, with half the UK inhabitants reporting anxiousness about snakes and about one in 50 harbouring a phobia, the thought of snakes as the brand new livestock of selection won’t have legs.
