Garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) in Manitoba court and mate at communal overwintering dens and then disperse to feeding ranges in summer. The restriction of mating activities to den areas may reduce gene flow between populations from adjacent dens, in turn allowing divergence in traits such as antipredator behavior. We quantified responses of adult male snakes to the approach of h...

Among terrestrial vertebrate gliders, take-off presents a unique problem to flying snakes (Chrysopelea). Without legs, snakes must use fundamentally different kinematics to begin their aerial trajectories. To determine the effectiveness of different modes of take-off in a gliding snake (C. paradisi), I videotaped multiple views of take-off from a horizontal branch and quantified the two- and th...

Attack behavior of inexperienced garter snakes to water extracts of normally eaten prey was investigated. Since eliminating vision and olfaction in newborn snakes did not alter response to chemical cues, Jacobson's organ is considered to be the receptor most involved. Slight variations in age and concentration did not affect potency of an extract, but, over a wider range of concentration, the r...

Abstract: Line smoothing in map generalisation is commonly seen as a comparatively simple operation. In this paper, however, the snakes model will be examined as a basic technique with respect to combined operations of displacement and smoothing. For line smoothing, two different snake models and their parametrisation with curvature controlled and constant parameters are examined. Further the s...

In this work we introduce a new method for representing and evolving snakes that are constrained to lie on a prescribed surface (triangle mesh). The new representation allows to automatically adapt the snake resolution to the surface tesselation and does not need any (unstable) back-projection operations. Furthermore, it enables efficient and robust collision detection and gives us complete con...

This study examined the nature of the anxiety reduction resulting from the administration of a film designed to reduce anxiety about snakes. One-hundred-sixty high school seniors viewed either a modeling film or a control film. As expected, the modeling group, compared to control subjects, experienced significantly greater decrements on self-report measures of anxiety and avoidance of snakes an...

Attention biases have been reported for ancestral threats like spiders and snakes in infants, children, and adults. However, it is currently unclear whether these stimuli induce increased physiological arousal in infants. Here, 6-month-old infants were presented with pictures of spiders and flowers (Study 1, within-subjects), or snakes and fish (Study 1, within-subjects; Study 2, between-subjec...