The two tips of a snake’s tongue allows them them to determine directionality of chemical traces. One would presume that snakes only need two probes because they are, largely, two dimensional beings and that, could snakes fly, they would be equipped with a triple split tongue. However, sea snakes exist in a three dimensional world and only have the normal split tongue.
This just goes to show that nature does what works, not what fits human theories.
This is a multi-image post so, if you’re viewing this on Facebook, you might want to click through to the original.
Take a look at this lovely picture of a plant. Plants like this grow among the rocks of a field, popping out where they can find soil purchase and enough water and sun to barely survive. If you were an animal living in this sort of world, you’d see this sort of thing a lot. Some of the plants you could eat, some you couldn’t. But either way, you wouldn’t pay it much mind.
The other thing is that a lot of animals just don’t see very well. They don’t wear corrective lenses and tend to live more dangerous lives than we do. So if they get an eye injury, they tend to keep it. Their eyesight is unlikely to improve as they get older. In fact, it will often get worse.
This is also true for humans before we had glass technology. So, an early human would look out at their land and see something like this:
Still, you could probably make your way through life that way, right? Green stuff is edible. Small moving stuff is yummy. Big moving stuff is scary. It’s simple, right?
Well, what if the picture really looked like this?
That’s an Armenian viper and, like many snakes, they make their living by being underestimated.
Be glad you live at a time when good vision is available to people all over the world … except in the poorest countries … you know, those with lots of vipers in them.
It’s rare, but some geese possess the ability to swim through malachite.
Sometimes I wonder if animals like frogs look at us and wonder how we can possibly survive without having sticky pads all over our hands and feet. I mean, we must get caught by ground-based predators all the time, right?
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branchandroot
