The Komodo “dragon,” named for the East Indian island where it was first found, is the largest living lizard. A voracious and undiscriminating carnivore, it will eat any kind of carrion, as well as living animals. Lethargic when it has fed, this monitor lizard shows surprising spurts of speed when hungry, and uses its long, strong tail with lethal dexterity.
Its fangs are too small to get a grip on a human. You can dig up a scarlet snake a foot underground, or chase a coach-whip over many acres, or see a slender twig on a bush turn into the air-thin grace of Opheodrys, the rough green snake. Most of the typical snakes on the place lay eggs, but some bear their young alive. Some eat any living prey they can catch and swallow, but the hog-nosed snakes lean heavily on toads for food, the king snake eats other snakes, and the red-bellied, shiny horn snake in the pond eats mostly salamanders.
The remaining snakes of the farm and of the world constitute two groups among which the production and injection of venom have become highly refined adaptations. These are the vipers and the cobras, the latter group including the coral snakes and sea snakes. The cobras and their relatives (family Elapidae) are found around the world in tropical regions. They kill prey by venom injected through fixed hollowed or grooved fangs located toward the front of the upper jaw. They are generally slender as compared with vipers, and except for one Australian species their heads are not markedly broadened or heart-shaped. Some of them, like the mambas of Africa, are big, swift, obstreperous and even warlike. Others are timid burrowers or foragers in leaf mold, like most of the American coral snakes. The king cobra of India with its frightening hood reaches a top length of about 18 feet, but some of the burrowing elapids may be only a few inches long, with a gape of mouth too narrow for biting people. In Australia, the cobralike snakes by far outnumber the typical snakes. There is a fantastic variety of species there, including such creatures as the dreaded tiger snake, the death adder and the 12-foot taipan, perhaps the most aggressive snake in the world.
The poisonous snakes with the most elaborate venom-injection apparatus are the vipers (family Viperidae). They are found on all the continents except Australia; in fact, most poisonous snakes temperate regions are vipers. There are two well-marked groups of them: the true vipers (subfamily Viperinae), confined to the Old World; and the pit vipers (subfamily Crotalinae), which have both American and Asiatic members but are mainly concentrated in the New World. Most vipers are stout-bodied snakes with the wedge-shaped or heart-shaped head generally thought of as the mark of a poisonous snake. The pit vipers include such imposing animals as the rattlesnakes and the tropical American fer-de-lance and bushmaster. Their name is derived from a sensory depression, or pit, in the side of the snout between the eye and the nostril. This is elaborately supplied with nerves and blood vessels and is an organ specialized for detecting the presence and range of warm objects. Most pit vipers eat warm-blooded prey, and the pit is no doubt used primarily in feeding, but like the rattle of the rattlesnake it is perhaps also of value as a means of avoiding injury under the hoofs of big mammals.
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