Networks of branches in arboreal environments create many functional challenges for animals, including traversing gaps between perches. Many snakes are arboreal and their elongate bodies are theoretically well suited for bridging gaps. However, only two studies have previously investigated gap bridging in snakes, and the effects of size are poorly understood. Thus, we videotaped and quantified ...

BACKGROUND Aquatic tentacled snakes (Erpeton tentaculatus) can take advantage of their prey's escape response by startling fish with their body before striking. The feint usually startles fish toward the snake's approaching jaws. But when fish are oriented at a right angle to the jaws, the C-start escape response translates fish parallel to the snake's head. To exploit this latter response, sna...

—To understand the effects of removal of non-native plants and fuels on wildlife in the riparian forest of the Middle Rio Grande in New Mexico, we monitored snakes from 2000 to 2006 using trap arrays of drift fences, pitfalls, and funnel traps. We recorded 158 captures of 13 species of snakes from 12 study sites. We captured more snakes in funnel traps than in pitfalls. The most frequent captur...

The main advantage of segmentation by snakes consists in its ability to incorporate smoothness constraints on the detected shapes that can occur. Likewise, we propose to model snakes with other properties that reeect the information provided about the object of interest in a diierent extent. We consider diierent kinds of snakes, those searching for contours with a certain direction, those prese...

The objective of this paper is to present a new class of odd graceful graphs. In particular, we show that the linear cyclic snakes (1, k) C4snake and (2, k) C4snake are odd graceful. We prove that the linear cyclic snakes (1, k) C6snake and (2, k) C6snake are odd graceful. We also prove that the linear cyclic snakes (1, k) C8snake and (2, k) C8snake are odd graceful. We generalize the above res...

A study was performed to determine the biological half-life and plasma concentrations of gentamicin in gopher snakes. The snake plasma was assayed for gentamicin, using a microbiological agar well diffusion technique. In the 1st study, 10 gopher snakes (groups A and B) were each given a single injection of gentamicin. They were anesthetized and samples of blood were collected each day to determ...

Arboreal habitats create diverse challenges for animal locomotion, but the numerical and phylogenetic diversity of snakes that climb trees suggest that their overall body plan is well suited for this task. Snakes have considerable diversity of axial anatomy, but the functional consequences of this diversity for arboreal locomotion are poorly understood because of the lack of comparative data. W...

The epidermis of snakes efficiently protects against dehydration and mechanical stress. However, only few proteins of the epidermal barrier to the environment have so far been identified in snakes. Here, we determined the organization of the Epidermal Differentiation Complex (EDC), a cluster of genes encoding protein constituents of cornified epidermal structures, in snakes and compared it to t...