Morphology, Behavior and Performance of the Feeding Apparatus of Snakes

许多蛇吞下几乎和自己一样大，甚至比自己更大的猎物的非凡能力，长期以来一直吸引着人类观察者，无论是普通公众还是科学界。然而，令人惊讶的是，人们很少尝试直接量化蛇的进食能力。在过去的十年中，这已经被证明是特别不幸的，在此期间，新兴的古生物学和分子系统发育数据已经被用来挑战两个长期存在的关于蛇进食系统进化的假设：（1）在蛇的进化历史中，进食性能逐渐增加;以及（2）摄食能力的系统性提高是由于头骨和颌骨器官中个体元素和功能单位的相对比例发生了进化变化。这些最近的挑战有助于引发关于蛇的进化及其独特的进食系统的激烈辩论，这场辩论之所以特别有争议，部分原因是缺乏严格测试这些假设和相关假设所需的定量数据。本项目将通过对喂蛇器的形态、行为和性能进行广泛的比较和高度定量的研究，提供此类数据。通过这项工作收集的数据将被用来构建一个详细的多变量模型，预测头骨形态的基础上的摄食性能。该模型对于客观推断化石蛇的摄食能力特别有价值。总的来说，从这项工作中出现的结果将提供一个非常精细和高度综合的新视角，对有颌脊椎动物中进化出的最显着的摄食系统之一的进化历史进行研究。这项工作将为研究生和博士后研究人员提供各种解剖技术的培训，同时也为这些发展中的科学家提供参加美国和国外会议的机会。此外，这项工作的初步研究已经涉及两名高中实习生，包括一名少数民族学生，PI将继续指导这些学生，并为他们提供参与这项研究的机会。这项工作还将促进活蛇研究收藏的进一步多样化，使广大科学界能够更自由地利用这些活蛇进行其他研究项目。最后，这项研究的结果将提供给广大观众，通过同行评议的期刊文章，在专业会议上的演讲，并通过万维网。

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.