Abstract Snake predation is considered an important evolutionary force for primates. Yet, very few studies have documented encounters between primates and snakes in the wild. Here, we provide a preliminary account of how wild moor macaques ( Macaca maura ) respond to seven species real model snakes. Snakes could be local dangerous (i.e., venomous or constricting), nondangerous, novel dangerous....

An individual’s sex, body size and colour pattern can influence its habitat use, and such partitioning can have important ecological and evolutionary consequences. We studied a system very different from those that have attracted previous research on this topic: sea snakes ( Emydocephalus annulatus ) in shallow-water coral-reef areas of New Caledonia. The snakes used habitats non-randomly in te...

The ability of animals to orient based on pheromonal cues in the environment can have significant consequences to their reproductive success and survival. For example, it is hypothesized that snakes use pheromone trails to locate potential mates during the breeding season and to locate winter hibernacula. Numerous studies have demonstrated that snakes are capable of detecting and following pher...

Understanding the origin and maintenance of functionally important subordinate traits is a major goal of evolutionary physiologists and ecomorphologists. Within the confines of a limbless body plan, snakes are diverse in terms of body size and ecology, but we know little about the functional traits that underlie this diversity. We used a phylogenetically diverse group of 131 snake species to ex...

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...