Eating Habits of Reptiles (Part 6)

The most restricted of all reptile victuallers we have heard of is a little burrowing snake, without a common name, known technically as Leptotyphlops phenops. It feeds on the contents of termites’ abdomens, which it apparently sucks out of the skin, leaving it and the thorax behind. Besides being strangely restricted, this diet is also the only one among snakes that involves the taking of pieces of a food object rather than the whole thing. All the rest of the snakes eat whole objects, with none of the chewing or tearing apart of food practiced by crocodilians and by some turtles.

One of the most refined hunting devices among reptiles is the insect-trapping tongue of the true chameleons. The tongue can be popped out for a distance equal to about one and a half times the length of the body of the animal, not including the tail. The end of the tongue is an enlarged bulb covered with an adhesive that will hold good-sized active prey-mostly insects, but sometimes even small birds and reptiles. A toad, of course, also uses a sticky tongue as an insect trap, but the way the chameleon shoots its tongue forward is very different. The tongue of the chameleon is hollow, and when not in use is bunched up, accordion-like, on a smooth, tapered cartilaginous projection of the bony throat structure, or hyoid apparatus. As the chameleon approaches a victim, whom it does with diabolical stealth, the whole tongue assembly is prepared for instant action towards the front of the mouth. The force that shoots the tongue out when it is triggered is a spasmic contraction of ring of muscle built into the structure of the forward section of the tongue. This squeezes down on the lubricated taper of the spike of cartilage like two fingers squeezing down on a watermelon seed, except that in this case it is the squeezing tongue that shoots out. At the same instant opposing muscles let go, and the tongue runs forward so fast that it flies out full length before it is finally stopped by elastic fibers in its wall. It is withdrawn by contractions of longitudinal muscles.

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