How Do Snakes See in the Dark?
Some snakes can convert changes in heat into electrical signals that let them see in the dark.
I’m a big fan of snakes! When I was a teenager, I had a boa constrictor as a pet and I had to feed it live mice. I would watch the boa kill the mouse and then swallow it whole. There would be this big lump in its body. The swelling gradually disappeared over the next few days as the snake digested its meal.
But what about snakes that live in the wild and hunt at night? Can they see in the dark? Or do they use some other way of finding their prey?
It turns out that snakes such as pit vipers, pythons, boas and other animals like bats and some insects hunt in total darkness and sense their prey by detecting the heat the animal gives off.
So, imagine you’re that snake. You can sense that your dinner is nearby and you can quietly slither up pretty close to it but can you tell which end is which and how big it is and so forth?
It turns out that you can but up until now, we didn’t know how.
Faezeh Darbanian and colleagues, researchers at Rutgers University, set out to uncover just how these creatures did that and offer their results in a paper they published in Matter a few years ago entitled “Soft Matter Mechanics…
