Organs are able to smell in the ordinary way too. This curious organ is not used in food-getting alone, but seems to be put to important social uses such as the forming of hibernating groups and the finding of one sex by another at mating time. Nevertheless, its part in the complex of feeding adaptations of the rattlesnake is evident. It is the only link that the poisonous snake has with the poisoned, doomed but still mobile prey.
Once the rattlesnake has caught up with its now dead or dying victim, it brings to bear the snake-wide ability to fit its jaws over huge packages of food. A four-foot rattler can swallow a full-grown cottontail rabbit. Moreover, it is able to provide itself with cottontails to swallow, something a nonvenomous snake could only rarely do. Nor does the interaction of adaptations end there. Because snake venom contains digestive enzymes, the process of digestion begins as soon as the venom diffuses into the tissues of the prey. This, too, is important in terms of economy and effort. Nonpoisonous snakes, especially the constrictors, which subdue big prey by squeezing them into immobility, must digest without the help of any internal enzyme action in their food. But for the rattlesnake, digestion of the huge bulk proceeds from the inside as well as at the surface, and there is little doubt that the time involved is greatly shortened – with whatever attendant profit the saving of time might yield to the snake.
The usefulness of venom is not confined to feeding alone. Its potential advantages as a defense mechanism are obviously also powerful. however, this point is not so simple as it might seem at first glance. For while it is clear that poison is a good thing to stay away from, how will another animal know that a snake is poisonous? The question leads to some interesting conclusions.
In feeding activity, of course, there is no conceivable reason why a snake should warn its prey of its venomous intentions. To convert feeding mechanisms to defense, however, either, against attack by snake-eating predators or against the hazard of being accidentally trod upon by heavy animals of any sort, some means of advertisement – a warning system – that will prevent the attack would seem to be required. Violent encounters in nature are generally disadvantageous, even to a poisonous snake, any any device that will reduce their frequency is bound to be a good thing to have. It is evidently for this very reason that coral snakes are usually brilliantly colored and marked, that cobras rise high and spread spectacular hoods, and that the rattlesnake sounds its rattle.
It may never be possible to prove satisfactorily that a rattlesnake evolved its rattle as a safety device, but common sense certainly supports this conclusion. Such mechanisms, however, if they actually work as they seem to, work in a complicated way. They must depend for their effort on a reactive mechanism in the potential enemy – that is to say, a concurrent evolutionary change that might produce in deer, for example, an tendency to shun fancily banded snakes or in coyotes to jump away from the buzz of a rattlesnake’s rattle. This is not hard to imagine, however. There are abundant cases in nature in which two different kinds of animals go through concomitant evolutionary changes that fit them for beneficial contacts with each other or reduce friction between them. In the relationships among living things harmony is at least as important as strife as a means of survival. A crab may cause havoc among the small animals that are its food, but at the same time it tolerantly goes about with a sea anemone on its back, or even makes overt moves to put the anemone there. The stinging cells of the anemone are protection for the crab, and the scraps from the crab’s feeding are eaten by its partner.
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