A century sounds like a long time, but not when we're talking about the time it takes for a species to make a huge leap in its evolution. That's what happened to the tiger snake: within 100 years, it developed huge jaws to have a food based on seabirds. Read the article and understand more about it.
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Normally, we associate the evolution of species with a long period of time, but what many don't know is that some can happen under our noses and much faster than we imagine.
A study published in Evolutionary Biology proves this fact by documenting the evolution of the tiger snake, the Notechis scutatus. The surprising evolution of this snake now allows it the possibility of swallowing whole bird chicks, which has made its survival viable on the small island it inhabits.
The tiger snake of the island of Carnac
The snake is very common and emblematic in Australia, but the ones in the study were those on the island of Carnac, located in the west of the country. The big issue is that this snake had not lived in the region for a century.
To survive, she began to feed on the large chicks of seagulls that nest in the region. To do so, it had to take a leap in evolution, after all, the tiger snake in other regions tends to feed on much smaller animals, such as frogs, for example.
phenotypic plasticity
The survival of the tiger snake in the region was due to a process called phenotypic plasticity. This phenomenon is what allows an organism to modify its physical body so that it can adapt to the environment in which it is living.
In addition to her, there are other animals that have experienced this process. Water fleas (Daphnia) can develop a kind of sharp helmet when they are around predators. The tadpoles of some swordfoot toads become carnivorous when they are in an environment with lots of small prey—even if other tadpoles are included.
How did the study go?
The researchers caught some tiger snakes from that region and some from another region. For one group, they put large mice; for the other, small mice.
Scholars noticed that snakes from other regions, regardless of the size of the prey, maintained their bite in the same way. On the other hand, those from the island of Carnac, when faced with large prey, had a much larger bite and larger jaw bones.
