Occasional use of arboreal habitats is common in many otherwise-terrestrial species, but the functions of facultative arboreality remain unclear. Red-sided garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) are small nonvenomous terrestrial snakes, recorded to climb only rarely. During springtime fieldwork near a large communal overwintering den in Manitoba, we observed occasional episodes when hun...

The biologist Gordon Walls proposed his "transmutation" theory through the 1930s and the 1940s to explain cone-like morphology of rods (and vice versa) in the duplex retinas of modern-day reptiles, with snakes regarded as the epitome of his hypothesis. Despite Walls' interest, the visual system of reptiles, and in particular snakes, has been widely neglected in favor of studies of fishes and ma...

Ultrasound images present major challanges to just about any segmentation algorithm, including active contour techniques, due to increased specularity, non-uniform edges along the boundaries of interest, incomplete and misleading visual support. Active contours that depend on a vector of parameters (e.g. B-splines), have been proposed in the literature, and have the advantage over traditional s...

Many snakes are able to use their chemosensory system to detect scent of conspecifics, which is important in many social contexts. Age discrimination based on chemical cues may be especially important to ensure access to sexually mature potential partners. In this study, we used 24 individual Boa constrictor snakes (12 adults mature and 12 non-mature individuals) that had been captured in diffe...

The snake in the box problem is an NP-hard problem which has been a challenging problem for both computer scientists and mathematicians. It aims to maximize certain types of paths (snakes) in a graph, an n-dimensional hypercube while satisfying certain constraints described using the concept of spread. This thesis identifies a common pattern among the longest snakes which is very similar to the...