Secrets of Tibet ’s hot-spring snakes revealed

Jia-Tang Li knows firsthand how tough life can be on the Tibetan Plateau. The air at 4500 meters is so thin that just a few steps take one’s breath away. Despite bitter cold, the Sun is intense enough to quickly burn the skin. Yet the small grayish-brown snakes this herpetologist at the Chengdu Institute of Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences studies have been thriving in the plateau’s northern reaches for millions of years. The Tibetan hot-spring snake, Thermophis baileyi , keeps from freezing to death by hanging around the region’s geothermal pools, feasting on frogs and small fish living there. Now, advances in genome sequencing are giving Li and others a more detailed look at how the snake has adapted to its extreme environment. In recent work, his team has pinpointed genetic adaptations that may help the snake find waters that are just warm enough and withstand the low oxygen and intense Sun. Li’s team has also reconstructed the snake’s evolutionary history, work that could guide efforts to save these reptiles as they face ever-greater threats from humans. “This is a pretty extreme place for snakes to be living,” says Sara Ruane, a herpetologist at the Field Museum. The work “just shows how adaptable snakes are.” Says Alex Pyron, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist at George Washington University: “For reptiles, we generally assume if it’s too cold, there won’t be any snakes or lizards. Not so fast, says Th...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news