Amniote vertebrates possess various mechanisms of sex determination, but their variability is not equally distributed. The large evolutionary stability of sex chromosomes in viviparous mammals and birds was believed to be connected with their endothermy. However, some ectotherm lineages seem to be comparably conserved in sex determination, but previously there was a lack of molecular evidence t...

Previous investigations have demonstrated the importance of predator diet in chemically mediated antipredator behaviour. However, there are few data on responses to life-stage-specific predator diets, which could be important for animals like amphibians that undergo metamorphosis and must respond to different suites of predators at different life-history stages. In laboratory choice tests, we i...

This paper presents the toolkit snakes that is aimed at providing a flexible solution to the problem of quickly prototyping Petri nets tools. In particular, snakes is expected to have as few built-in limitations as possible with respect to the particular variant of Petri net to be used. The goal is to make snakes suitable for any kind of Petri net model, including new ones for which there exist...

Cardiovascular responses to head-up tilt, acutely graded hemorrhage, and pharmacologic stimulation by principal autonomic drugs were studied in four species of marine snakes, principally Aipysurus laevis (family Hydrophiidae). Arterial pressure varied inversely with tilt angle and blood volume deficit in conscious snakes outside of water, indicating that physiological regulation was poor or lac...

Mass aerial delivery of dead mouse baits treated with acetaminophen has been evaluated as a means to reduce brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) populations over large areas, increasing the likelihood of wide-scale eradication on Guam. Given the high density of snakes in some areas of their invasive range, eradication efforts could result in a resource pulse that may influence food web dynamics...

As nontraditional model organisms with extreme physiological and morphological phenotypes, snakes are believed to possess an inferior taste system. However, the bitter taste sensation is essential to distinguish the nutritious and poisonous food resources and the genomic evidence of bitter taste in snakes is largely scarce. To explore the genetic basis of the bitter taste of snakes and characte...

Since their debut in 1987, snakes (active contour models) have become a standard image analysis technique with several variants now in common use. We present a framework called "United Snakes", which has two key features. First, it unifies the most popular snake variants, including finite difference, B-spline, and Hermite polynomial snakes in a consistent finite element formulation, thus expand...

Parthenogenesis occurs across a variety of vertebrate taxa. Within squamate reptiles (lizards and snakes), a group for which the largest number of cases has been documented, both obligate and facultative types of parthenogenesis exists, although the obligate form in snakes appears to be restricted to a single basal species of blind snake, Indotyphlops braminus. By contrast, a number of snake sp...

Habitat fragmentation effects on annual survival of the federally protected eastern indigo snake" (2012). NASA Publications. Paper 106. Abstract The eastern indigo snake (Drymarchon couperi) is a federally listed species, most recently threatened by habitat loss and habitat degradation. In an effort to estimate snake survival, a total of 103 individuals (59 males, 44 females) were followed usin...