Mandibular sawing in a snail-eating snake

A snail-eating snake recognizes prey handedness

Specialized predator-prey interactions can be a driving force for their coevolution. Southeast Asian snail-eating snakes (Pareas) have more teeth on the right mandible and specialize in predation on the clockwise-coiled (dextral) majority in shelled snails by soft-body extraction. Snails have countered the snakes' dextral-predation by recurrent coil reversal, which generates diverse countercloc...

Asymmetry of mandibular dentition is associated with dietary specialization in snail-eating snakes

BACKGROUND In vertebrates, the left-and-right pairs of homologous organs are generally present in equal numbers. A remarkable exception is snail-eating snakes in the family Pareidae: almost all the pareid snakes have much more teeth on the right mandible than on the left for functional specialization in feeding on the dextral majority of land snails. Because the only exceptional species with sy...

Use of Snake Antivenom and Clinical Outcomes in Snake Envenomation: A Retrospective Study in a Tertiary Hospital in Penang, Malaysia

SAWing on Symmetry

In this paper we investigate the behavior of mutation-based evolutionary algorithms on highly symmetric binary constraint satisfaction problems. With empirical methods we study why and when these algorithms perform better under the stepwise adaptive weighting of penalties (SAWing) than under the standard penalty function. We observe that SAWing has little effect when the local optima of the sym...

Simulation of Hardwood Log Sawing

Preface Abstract Mathematical modeling computer programs for several hardwood sawing systems have been developed and are described. One has judgment capabilities. Several of the subroutines are common to all of the models. These models are the basis for further research which examines the question of best-grade sawing method in terms of lumber value yield. This Research Paper is one in a series...