How often a rattlesnake sheds, she explained, depends more on how much it's had to eat, rather than how old it is. But that can rise to three or four times if there is plenty of prey available. That number typically slows down to once or twice a year when they reach adulthood. Plus, rattles often break off in the wild, sometimes after attacks by other predators or other times when they are damaged by a life of slithering over harsh, often rocky terrain.
Rattles that have been broken in the past often appear thick at the end, while rattles that have gone undamaged will taper to a point. Most people think of rattlesnakes as hunters out on their own with only a single impulse in life -- to kill. But rattlesnakes can be very social with each other, and can actually be caring parents.
We noticed that female rattlesnakes tend to hang out with one another. Taylor has observed males and females spending time together in the time leading up to the mating season, which she thinks may be related to mate guarding. Even more surprising is that female rattlesnakes tend to hang out together when they are pregnant, and potentially give birth together. Mother rattlesnakes look after their young for a period after their birth until their first shed. Search-Icon Created with Sketch. KQED is a proud member of.
Always free. Sign In. KQED Inform. Save Article Save Article. Deep Look. Josh Cassidy. Jul 30, But that's exactly what some scientists are doing. By studying how rattlesnakes are able to use their muscles so quickly and at a low cost of energy per shake, the researchers are developing new exercise techniques that may allow frail and elderly people to better avoid injury, enable patients in rehab to heal faster, and perhaps even make it possible for some people a lot shorter than basketball players to pull off those gravity-defying dunks.
A rattlesnake rattle is made of dead tissue and its owner shakes it by twitching sets of small muscles on either side of its tail. What scientists could not understand, for a long time, was how the reptile can rattle so vigorously for, in some cases, hours. The rattlesnake combines the speed of a sprinter with the endurance of a marathoner.
They found two reasons for this: First, the muscles produce little force; second, they don't rely exclusively on oxygen for fuel. The researchers also believe--though they've been unable to prove--that rattlesnakes shake not by shortening the muscles on the side of the tail toward which the rattle is moving, as one might expect, but by using their muscles as a brake.
Producing force in a lengthening muscle, they found, requires much less energy than in one that is shortening. That's why a backpacker hiking into the Grand Canyon, using most of her muscles as a brake, burns fewer calories than she does coming back out.
She's moving the same amount of weight around, but the muscles that do the bulk of the work are primarily lengthening rather than shortening as she descends. Lengthening a muscle also produces at least twice as much force as shortening it. A weightlifter who can bench-press pounds knows that the challenge comes in lifting the barbell up; he can easily let down much more weight than that.
It was this combination of low energy consumption and high force production that really captured the researchers' attention. When muscles produce high force, they grow stronger. Yet most exercise regimens focus on aerobic activity or making muscles stronger through contractions that shorten them.
Many people, such as the elderly or heart patients, don't have the energy to expend on such conventional weightlifting and thus cannot avoid muscle wasting. Even if you're elderly your muscles are responsive.
You can still build muscle mass. Written By: Carmen Leitch. OCT 18, Two new, unrelated studies have examined how very different environmental disasters affected wildlife in the areas where OCT 21, The scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is overwhelming.
A recent study published this week in Envi Written By: Matthew Lundy. OCT 27, A duo of Stanford researchers have recently released a study in Global Sustainability that reveals the timing of policy NOV 05, This photo by Sydney Stringham shows the domestic pigeons that were bred by the researchers for this research. Tagging is how all of our articles, products and events are related to each other.
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