snakes

Just because most mutants don't gain special powers doesn't make them any less interesting. Case and point, this snake discovered the other day in Southwest China. Looking at the picture, you should be able to figure out what makes this snake different from most. Namely, the weird clawed limb sticking out of its side.

For years, Burmese pythons have invaded Florida's Everglades National Park, preying on indigenous species. Tracking them down has proven time consuming and difficult, so Park wardens have begun testing a new hunting method imported straight from the front lines of the War on Terror: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and thermal imaging technology.

David Hallac of The National Park Service already uses manned, fixed-wing aircraft to search the Everglades for birds, and he said moving to UAVs to cut down on costs is the natural next step.

At Carnegie Mellon, those masters-of-the-robo-universe have a dedicated lab for studying snake locomotion and applying it to robots that can swim, climb telephone poles and wriggle up walls.

Snakes can slither through tight spaces, swim across lakes, scale trees, and even glide through the air. Their mechanical doubles won’t be flying anytime soon, but thanks to technological leaps in climbing ability, snakebots could soon tackle a few notoriously dangerous jobs.

Sliding Easy: An artists conception of the snake in its natural habitat, 60 million years ago.  Jason Bourque/University of Florida

A research team found the vertebrae of the 43-foot long snake down the Cerrejon Coal Mine in northern Colombia. Their report appears in Nature this week, and gives a conservative estimate that the snake weighed 2,500 pounds when it lived 60 million years ago.

As predators, snakes are missing a few key attributes. They have no legs to chase down their prey, no paws to knock down quarry, and no claws to hold their victims. But none of these deficiencies matters much, because evolution has handed snakes the ultimate weapon: venom. With it, the several hundred types of venomous snakes can kill or debilitate before their victims escape.