Morphology, Behavior and Performance of the Feeding Apparatus of Snakes

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The remarkable ability of many snakes to swallow prey whole that are nearly as large, or even larger, than themselves has long fascinated human observers, both among the general public and within the scientific community. Surprisingly, however, relatively few attempts have been made to directly quantify the feeding capabilities of snakes. This has proven to be particularly unfortunate over the course of the last decade, during which emerging paleontological and molecular phylogenetic data have been used to challenge two long-standing hypotheses about the evolution of snake feeding systems: (1) that feeding performance has increased progressively throughout the evolutionary history of snakes; and (2) that phyletic increases in feeding performance have resulted from evolutionary changes in the relative proportions of individual elements and functional units within the skull and jaw apparatus. These recent challenges have helped to fuel an intense debate about the evolution of snakes and their uniquely derived feeding systems, a debate that has become particularly contentious in part because the quantitative data necessary to rigorously test these and related hypotheses have been lacking. This project will provide such data, through broadly comparative and highly quantitative studies of the morphology, behavior and performance of the snake feeding apparatus. The data collected through this work will be used to construct a detailed multivariate model predicting feeding performance on the basis of skull morphology. This model will be particularly valuable for making objective inferences about the feeding capabilities of fossil snakes. Collectively, the results that emerge from this work will provide a greatly refined and highly integrative new perspective on the evolutionary history of one of the most remarkable feeding systems ever to have evolved among jawed vertebrates. This work will provide training for graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher in a variety of anatomical techniques, while also providing opportunities for these developing scientists to attend meetings, both in the U.S. and abroad. In addition, preliminary studies for this work have already involved two high school interns, including one minority student, and the PI will continue to mentor such students and provide opportunities for them to participate in this research. This work will also facilitate further diversification of a research collection of live snakes, which will be made more freely accessible to the scientific community at large for other research projects. Finally, the results of this research will be made available to a broad audience, through peer-reviewed journal articles, presentations at professional meetings, and through the World Wide Web.