Snakes have no social lives or feelings huh?
LOOK WHAT I FOUND ON discovery.com:
Study: Snakes Are Social, Family Loving
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
Togetherness, Snake-Style
Feb. 13, 2004 — Snakes lead rich social lives and often bond with certain family members, a new study of rattlesnakes suggests.
The research dispels the stereotype of snakes, particularly venomous ones, as antisocial loners. Instead, like humans and many other creatures, snakes seem to benefit from quality time spent with members of their own species.
For the study, the litters of three timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus), born to females caught in the wild, were observed in a laboratory setting.
Rulon Clark, author of the study and a researcher in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, measured physical closeness between family and non-family members.
The findings are published in the Royal Society's current issue of Biology Letters.
Clark determined that female siblings stayed extraordinarily close to each other. When resting, female snakes would coil themselves next to their sisters. Demonstrating perhaps the snake version of a hug, female rattlers also at times would entwine their bodies around those of their sisters.
Male snakes in the study did not seem to show much preference for whom they hung out with, but Clark indicated males could be social too.
"Rattlesnakes in northern climates tend to overwinter in communal dens," Clark told Discovery News. "Before going into these dens in the winter, and after coming out in the spring, males and females will spend several days basking around the entrances to the dens in groups."
He added that males and females also bask together before they shed their skins.
Female snakes, however, seem to bond more than males. Such closeness particularly occurs in the months before they give birth. Females even establish a type of nursery.
"In many species, females tend to (bask) in groups, so several females may spend months together basking in the same area, often touching, and then give birth in the same area as well," explained Clark. "These areas are called birthing rookeries, and usually occur close to an overwintering den area."
Harry Greene, professor and curator in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell, thinks the new study is "convincing and exciting," and theorizes that mother rattlesnakes form groups to protect their young against predators.
Although no snake species definitively has been shown to form family groups, this study and others suggest that rattlesnakes and species in the viper family are social and family oriented. Clark said such snakes include European vipers, northern copperheads, and other rattlesnake species that occur in northerly climates.
Since many snakes are endangered due, in part, to habitat loss and rattlesnake killing roundups that still occur in some U.S. states, both Clark and Greene hope the new findings will change the public's negative view of snakes and rattlesnakes, which actually are useful, natural members of ecosystems.
Greene said, "It will be interesting to see how these discoveries of parental care and innate tendencies toward female aggregation with relatives might affect people's perceptions of rattlesnakes, and whether these new discoveries will help us see them more as interesting animals, with rich individual lives, and less as evil objects, as if their reason for existence were to terrorize us."
Clark suggested, "Perhaps, if people knew enough about them, (rattlesnakes) could even be used as a positive icon for the conservation of habitat. Snakes certainly grab people's attention."
SO THERE
LOL !!!!
