Snake learning

Carothers hard-driving and intense, yet also quiet and warm. When Carothers was in good humor, no one was funnier, cleverer, or wittier. But when he was depressed, his mood affected everyone around him. And when he was low, Marvel said, he was lower than a snake s belly. Marvel later learned polymer chemistry from his student and became the first academic polymer researcher in the United States. 

Visual and chemical cues interact in foraging by natricine snakes. Even visual cues alone can elicit prey attack, especially in aquatic foraging (Drummond, 1985). Aposematic color patterns of prey enhance the learning of prey that induces illness. Garter snakes, Thamnophis radix hay deni, were exposed to fish and earthworms presented on black-and-yellow forceps, and then inj ected with lithium chloride (LiCl). Control prey was offered on green forceps. Later, the snakes avoided food from either forceps, but the aversion to prey paired with black-andyellow was stronger (Terrick etal, 1995). 

Snakes can learn to discriminate profitable from less-manageable prey. Naive garter snakes, Thamnophis melanogaster, attacked both the carrion-eating leech Erpobdellapunctata and the blood-sucking leech Haementeria officinalis even though naive snakes respond less to the odor of H. officinalis. The latter thwarted... 

Burghardt, G. M., Wilcoxon, H. C., and Czaplicki, J. A. (1973). Conditioning in garter snakes aversion to palatable prey induced by delayed illness. Animal Learning and Behavior 1,317-320. 

Drummond, H. and Garcia, M. (1995). Congenital responsiveness of garter snakes to a dangerous prey abolished by learning. AntVna/Be/wvwar49,891-900. 

Fuchs, J. L. and Burghardt, G. M. (1971). Effects of early feeding experience on the responses of garter snakes to food chemicals. Learning and Motivation 2,271-279. 

The threatening events that cause us to be scared fall into two classes those that are innate (i.e., we are born with them) and those that are learned. We seem to have an innate sense of fear to some situations—that is, we are sometimes scared of things even if we ve never experienced them before or if they have never threatened us in the past. For example, many people are afraid of the dark, even if they have never had a bad experience in the dark. Some scientists believe that we have an innate fear of certain shapes, like the shape of a snake. 

If the snake encounters a pattern it hasn t learned yet, as when you first start the game, it will ask you for a direction. Again, the direction you choose will train the snake for that pattern. 

At the edges there are two chiripa-machacos [chin pa = rainbow machaco = snake] with red horns. These snakes have such a hypnotic power that if one learns their icaro, one can elucidate anything in the subconscious, even the most concealed things. 

In the upper left corner are several Indian and mestizo shamans. The one to the left is a mestizo, expert in the use of ayahuasca. Next comes a Shipibo curandero able to heal his patients from a distance. Then comes a Campa shaman capable of transforming himself into any kind of snake. The next one is a criollo [of white descent] shaman who learned to perform sorcery through the supay-tuyuyo. In this vision he tried to harm the Shipibo shaman with his supaytuyuyo, but the Shipibo sent his huaira-nacanaca [nacanaca = snake, huaira = airj to kill the bird. 

It may be tempting to equate the concept of venom with poison, but to do so would be inaccurate. Many plants, for example, are poisonous but present no harm to humans because they have learned not to eat them. By contrast, one can be quite careful on a walk through the southwestern United States or Australian outback and still have an unfortunate accident involving the venom of a snake. In any given year, around 40,000 people die as a result of snakebites. To be more accurate with the definition of venom, therefore, it must be noted that venom is not just a poison, but one that is injected under the skin of the victim. 

From control studies, we learned that periodate and ethylene glycol, separately and in mixture, behave neither as attractants nor as aversive agents for garter snakes. Treatment of EWW with different concentrations of periodate for 15 minutes at room temperature (RT) resulted in loss of chemoattractant activity at 2.8 mM periodate while at 2.1 mM periodate activity could still be detected. When the reaction time was increased to 1 hour at RT, activity was retained up to 0.83 mM periodate but lost at 1.25 mM periodate (Fig. 8). At 8.3 mM periodate at RT, inactivation was instantaneous. (The periodate concentrations shown in Fig. 8 are the concentrations used prior to dilution with EWW. In the text, final periodate concentrations are used. The equivalent values are, initial concentrations 0.1, 1.0, 10.0, 20.0, 30.0, 40.0, 50.0 mM final concentrations 0.007, 0.04, 0.42, 0.83, 1.25, 1.67, 2.1 mM, respectively.)... 

Investigatory behavior in the plains garter snake (Thamnophis radix) and several additional species, Anim. Behav. Learn., 4 273. 

Chiszar, D., Wellborn, S., Wand, M. A., Scudder, K. M., and Smith, H. M., 1980, Investigatory behavior in snakes. II. Cage cleaning and the induction of defecation in snakes, Anim. Learn. Behav., 8 505. 

Natrix . rhombifera) and garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) to chemical cues, Anim. Learn. Behav., 2 129. 

Snake venoms include toxins showing high selectivity for subtypes of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, which control a variety of processes including the modulation of the heart rate, control of motor systems, and the modulation of learning and memory, as well as toxins that block particular subtypes of voltage-dependent sodium or potassium channels in neurons. 

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