"Early one evening a few years ago, I took a short hike with my wife, Jamie, in the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary in Belize. The large, lush reserve is known for its healthy population of jaguars, so, following closely behind our guide, we kept our eyes peeled for the elusive cats. We saw a few tracks and some claw marks on trees, but elected to leave the jungle before nightfall.
We were very near the end of the trail when we were surprised by a large snake, about six feet long, crossing directly in front of us. Belize has lots of snakes, more than 50 species. Some can get pretty large, like the boa constrictor, which is impressive but harmless.
This one was not harmless. Even in the darkening jungle, the triangular pattern on its back allowed me to identify it quickly as a fer-de-lance, the most dangerous snake in Belize.
Excited, and comfortable that I was well out of striking range, I reached into my backpack for my video camera and flipped on its “night shot” feature. I now saw the magnificent snake clearly on my LCD screen. As I tried to creep in for a closer shot, however, I felt something holding me back.
It was Jamie. She had a grip on my backpack and was concerned that my enthusiasm for snakes had overtaken my judgment. She was not convinced that we were out of range, nor that the snake would not move quickly toward us. I used the zoom and filmed from where I stood.
For me to film the snake in the dark, I had to rely on Sony’s innovation and engineering. The camera’s infrared LED source generated light with a longer wavelength than the human eye can detect; those photons then bounced off the snake and were detected by the camera’s infrared sensors and converted into an image. "
...
"Humans and other warm-blooded animals emit heat as infrared radiation. Pit vipers are so adept at infrared sensing that some can detect potential prey a meter away.
To understand how snakes evolved their infrared detection systems, a group of scientists led by (former Pew Scholar) Prof. David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, searched for potential infrared-sensing proteins in the western diamondback rattlesnake. They looked in particular at genes active in the nerve cells that are connected to the pits, called trigeminal neurons.
They found one gene, known as TRPA1, that was 400-fold more active in rattlesnake trigeminal neurons than in other kinds of neurons. Moreover, they found that the TRPA1 gene was not highly active in the trigeminal neurons of snakes lacking pits. These two pieces of evidence suggested that TRPA1 might encode a protein involved in infrared sensing. "
- Date added:
- Aug 29, 2012
- Project:
- Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences
- Topic:
- Biomedical Research
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