Reptile & Amphibian Forums

hello all. i have recently been offered the opportunity to work in a lab with Michael Grace (an authority on thermalreceptive organs in boids and vipers) at my college, Florida Tech. I was pondering the possible topics i could study regarding snakes, and i realized that this would be a good place to ask for suggestions... many of you have kept snakes longer than i have and i am sure you have at one time or another wondered HOW or WHY your snakes behave a certain way or do the things they do. whether it's snake's physiology, anatomy, or behavior... i will have the ability to design experiments to study any aspect of these snakes (mostly from the family Boidae and Viperdae).
-Adam

I would love to know more about the breeding processes. I have a male and a femail JCP, and I tried breeding them for the first time last year. However I came up empty handed, all the eggs where duds, as if they had never been fertilized. I would love to know more about how if you will, get in the mood. I want to breed these snakes very badly, and any and all help you can post about ways to improve the chances of sucsesfull breeding would be a great help.

Matt

thank you for the suggestion. however, i am looking for something that has more of a scientific approach where i could propose a theory and test a hypothesis. the breeding of most pythongs, for the most part, is a well known topic. as long as the conditions that trigger reproductive behavior are present, and as long as you have a conditioned mature pair, breeding will commence. maybe i will study breeding, i just wanted to do something more original.

Hi.

Below is a link to a thread conderning night and day color changes in IJ carpet pythons. As you'll read from the posters it is speculated that they (as well as other snakes mentioned) might turn darker during the day to absorb more heat, then lighten up at night. But there may be other reasons. It's an interesting thread and perhaps it will interest you as well.

http://www.moreliapythons.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4146

Regards,

Bill

thank you for the suggestion. there are a few morelia species in the snake lab. designing an experiment around this may be possible. i'll see what i can think of.

Adam,
...What I have been wondering is what sort of process occurs in the brain of snakes with thermoreceptive pits. Is there a relatively large area of the brain involved in this or is it no more involved than we human's ability to detect heat but with the pitted snakes having much better receptors? We humans can feel heat and can even detect the direction that intense heat is coming from. Snakes with thermoreceptive pits can do this but are infinitely more sensitive and can detect and directionally home in on amazingly small heat sources. Conventional wisdom is that the difference must be because their heat receptive pits are that much more sensitive. Perhaps they have an entirely different "circuit" in their brains and what would be considered as a seventh sense. Are the nerves from the thremoreceptive pits significantly different than the nerves which transmit the other senses? You know more about this subject than anyone that I know. What do you think are the unanswered questions that need to be answered?
Jeff

>>hello all. i have recently been offered the opportunity to work in a lab with Michael Grace (an authority on thermalreceptive organs in boids and vipers) at my college, Florida Tech. I was pondering the possible topics i could study regarding snakes, and i realized that this would be a good place to ask for suggestions... many of you have kept snakes longer than i have and i am sure you have at one time or another wondered HOW or WHY your snakes behave a certain way or do the things they do. whether it's snake's physiology, anatomy, or behavior... i will have the ability to design experiments to study any aspect of these snakes (mostly from the family Boidae and Viperdae).
>>-Adam

"Boas, pythons and pitvipers use extremely sensitive infrared-receptive facial pit organs to detect temperature differentials between distant objects. This information is then analyzed in the brain to produce a spatial map of the environment analogous to that produced by the visual system. "
That is a summary of what Dr. Michael Grace's research has begun to uncover. These experiments are pretty elaborate, and i know he and some of the students at my university have written quite a few papers on this topic. I will try to get copies of those papers and i will get back to you. Here are some links with additional information.

hyper.fit.edu/biology/Faculty/Grace.htm

abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98115&page=1