For the Love of Snakes

[Iridescence]

Python Hearts May Hold Key to Treating Cardiac Disease | Heart Disease Treatments & Fatty Acids | Burmese Pythons Gorge on Rats & Snake Science | LiveScience

After pythons eat a meal, their organs — including their hearts — nearly double in size within a day. Now, researchers have learned how the snakes are able to achieve this sort of growth without heart damage, a finding that could lead to new therapies for human heart disease.


After a meal, python blood is so full of triglycerides, a form of cholesterol, that it appears milky, said study researcher Leslie Leinwand, a biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In humans, these fatty compounds would be deposited in heart muscle, but the snakes escape without damage.


"The python heart is able to burn these fats as fuel very, very efficiently, without any harm to it," Leinwand told LiveScience.

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Growing healthy hearts
Years ago, Leinwand read an article about Burmese pythons and their amazing ability to fast for months, gorge on food and undergo massive organ growth with no apparent ill effects. Plenty of researchers have looked to the strengths of other organisms to see if there could be any benefits to humans; for example, a diabetes drug released in 2005, called Byetta, was developed from the saliva of the Gila monster.


Leinwand wanted to know if python physiology might be the key to human drug treatments. In humans, heart growth can be a sign of health or of disease: Athletes' hearts grow large with exercise, but the chambers of the heart that pump the blood stay large, too. That makes the heart more efficient overall. In people with heart disease or high blood pressure, the heart muscle often swells as it works harder to pump blood. But this type of heart growth takes up space in the heart chamber, meaning each beat of the heart pumps less blood.


Figuring out how to encourage healthy heart growth in humans could be a boon for heart disease patients, Leinwand said.


"It's very well known from decades of work that exercise is good for your heart," she said. "But a lot of times, people who have heart disease can't exercise enough to get that benefit."


The goal, Leinwand said, is to create a drug treatment that could nudge a diseased heart toward healthy growth. [Top 10 Amazing Facts About Your Heart]

The heart of a python


First, however, she had to learn how to take care of pythons and set up a python colony in her Boulder lab. That took some time, she said.


Once the researchers figured out python husbandry, they set about figuring out the molecular secrets of python gorging and fasting. So they had pythons fast for 28 days (much less than they do in the wild, where they can go without food for almost a year), and then gorge on a mouse or rat weighing 25 percent of the snake's own body weight. Then the researchers analyzed blood from both the fasting python and the fed python to see what molecular changes occur. [Gruesome Images Reveal Python Digesting a Rat]


Early on in this experiment, a postdoctoral researcher in Leinwand's lab, Cecilia Riquelme, came to Leinwand with a suggestion: They should test blood plasma of pythons that had been fed — the part of blood that red blood cells float in — on rat heart cells to see if molecules in the plasma would make mammal hearts grow as they did the reptile hearts.


"That's a huge leap," Leinwand said. "And in fact, I've laughed about this since, because I told her not to do it. I thought there was no chance it was going to work."


Riquelme didn't listen, and completed the rat heart-cell experiment anyway. It worked. The heart cells grew in a lab dish.


"That reinforced our desire to study the pythons," Leinwand said. "If we can understand this biology, it looks like we can use this in mammals."

Fatty acid protection


The researchers began to hunt for the specific molecules that signal the heart to grow within the pythons' blood plasma. They eventually discovered a particular batch of fatty acids that seem to trigger a flood of heart-protecting enzymes to keep damage at bay. Next, the researchers hooked up mice to miniature pumps that injected them with low doses of this fatty-acid mixture over the course of a week.


Just as the rat heart cells had grown in the dish, the living mouse hearts grew, too. And there was no sign of the muscle stiffening that accompanies heart growth in patients with heart disease, the researchers report in the Oct. 28 issue of the journal Science.


The fatty-acid mixture is a long way from being used in human treatments, but the researchers are now testing it in mice with heart disease to see if they can halt or reverse the damage. Even if the treatment succeeds in mice, it may not work in humans. But other researchers say that the shared evolutionary history of all organisms offers some hope.


"It's a well-established pathway for discovery," said Tom Cech, a biochemist and Nobel laureate at UC Boulder who did not participate in Leinwand's study. "You look for an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and then you study it in that organism that exaggerates it. Because all of life is connected through evolution, very often results from other organisms are relevant to human biology."

...fascinating...

 

[waltky]

Python potpourri...

Pythons Unlock Human Heart Health Secrets
October 31, 2011 - Studying snakes might seem like an unlikely way to help people with heart disease, but a python’s remarkable ability to quickly enlarge its heart during digestion has Colorado medical researchers looking toward surprising new therapies to treat human heart conditions.

Young Burmese pythons coil in plastic boxes at a science lab at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Each one is well over a meter long, but they can grow to seven meters. The snakes' “extreme” physiology is why molecular biologist Leslie Leinwand studies them. For instance, she says, even a big python never needs a mid-day dinner or even a weekly meal. “They can go for months and months without eating anything, and nothing terrible happens to them.”

When these giant serpents do finally show up for supper, they prefer rats, pigs or even a deer. And, unlike people, pythons never nibble. They swallow their prey whole, in one gulp. After that, Leinwand says, things get even stranger. “Right after they eat a meal, the bulk of their organs in the body get bigger.” To speed digestion after that monstrous meal, the python’s heart also gets bigger - 40 percent larger than normal - and it can take two weeks for a python to finish digesting its dinner. After that, the heart and digestive organs gradually return to their normal size.

Dramatic changes

The key to this unusual process appears to be the python’s blood. When scientists filter out the red blood cells of a resting python, the remaining plasma is clear, like human plasma. However, python plasma changes dramatically during the first days of digestion. “Their blood is actually milky white, and that milkiness, what’s making it white, is actually the fat in the blood,” CU student Ryan Doptis explains.

That fat gives the python energy to digest its meal, says Leinwand, just as blood fats fuel our bodies. However, she says, the strange, milky blood coursing through a python’s body during the digestion process contains 50 times more fat than normal. In people, high blood fat can increase the risk of heart attack, but that's not the case for these snakes. “In the python, it isn’t toxic at all. What happens is the pythons have evolved a way of burning that fat, that’s in the blood, very efficiently and without harmful byproducts," says Leinwand. "There’s what we would call cardio-protection or heart protection that the python has.”

Heart protection

See also:

South Florida python swallows 76-pound adult deer
October 31, 2011 - South Florida python: A 16-foot Burmese python was spotted in a tree island in Florida's Everglades and shot dead. An autopsy revealed that it had devoured a 76-pound deer.

Work crews in western Miami-Dade County, Fla., Thursday discovered a 16-foot Burmese python in the process of digesting a fully grown deer, the largest intact prey ever discovered in a Burmese python in the Sunshine State. The snake was on a tree island, and it was killed with a shotgun. An autopsy revealed that the snake had just swallowed a 76-pound doe (meaning that the hungry python didn't have antlers to contend with). “It shows you they can eat huge things,” said python expert Skip Snow, rather obviously, to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Snow conducted the autopsy on the snake.

Burmese pythons are threatening to become the top predator in the Everglades. The snakes began to take hold in the region in the mid-1990s, after being released into the wild by overwhelmed owners of the exotic pets, who realized that they may have bitten off more than they could chew – a characteristic not shared by reptiles capable of unhinging their jaws. The pythons are currently restricted to southern Florida, but researchers have determined that the species could survive as far north as Washington, D.C. (The snake is no stranger to cold, as its natural habitat extends to the foothills of the Himalayas.) Perhaps more worrying is the prospect that the species is interbreeding with the man-eating African rock python, yielding an extremely aggressive hybrid.

A study published in the current issue of Science found that postprandial pythons, which rapidly double the size of their hearts, livers, intestines, and kidneys, do so by expanding the cells in these organs through a process called hypertrophy. The process is spurred by a combination of fatty acids, that, when injected into a mouse, produce similar growth.

Source

 

[editec]

Yes this is a fascinating discovery.

It's still another damned good reason to insure that we don't destroy species by destroying their habitates.

Mother nature has been doing experiments on what works for life for billions of years and she still has much to teach us about biochemistry.

 

[uscitizen]

Most politicians already have the heart of a snake.

 

[uscitizen]

Yes this is a fascinating discovery.

It's still another damned good reason to insure that we don't destroy species by destroying their habitates.

Mother nature has been doing experiments on what works for life for billions of years and she still has much to teach us about biochemistry.

Perhaps we do need to back off a bit on this occupy wall street thing?

 

[9thIDdoc]

It's still another damned good reason to insure that we don't destroy species by destroying their habitates.

I don't imagine deer would be all that sorry to see pythons go.

 

[waltky]

Dat's why Granny don't move to Florida, might get eatin' by a big ol' snake...

Pythons apparently wiping out Everglades mammals
Mon Jan 30,`12 – A burgeoning population of huge pythons — many of them pets that were turned loose by their owners when they got too big — appears to be wiping out large numbers of raccoons, opossums, bobcats and other mammals in the Everglades, a study says.

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that sightings of medium-size mammals are down dramatically — as much as 99 percent, in some cases — in areas where pythons and other large, non-native constrictor snakes are known to be lurking. Scientists fear the pythons could disrupt the food chain and upset the Everglades' environmental balance in ways difficult to predict. "The effects of declining mammal populations on the overall Everglades ecosystem, which extends well beyond the national park boundaries, are likely profound," said John Willson, a research scientist at Virginia Tech University and co-author of the study.

Tens of thousands of Burmese pythons, which are native to Southeast Asia, are believed to be living in the Everglades, where they thrive in the warm, humid climate. While many were apparently released by their owners, others may have escaped from pet shops during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and have been reproducing ever since. Burmese pythons can grow to be 26 feet long and more than 200 pounds, and they have been known to swallow animals as large as alligators. They and other constrictor snakes kill their prey by coiling around it and suffocating it. The National Park Service has counted 1,825 Burmese pythons that have been caught in and around Everglades National Park since 2000. Among the largest so far was a 156-pound, 16.4-foot one captured earlier this month.

For the study, researchers drove 39,000 miles along Everglades-area roads from 2003 through 2011, counting wildlife spotted along the way and comparing the results with surveys conducted on the same routes in 1996 and 1997. The researchers found staggering declines in animal sightings: a drop of 99.3 percent among raccoons, 98.9 percent for opossums, 94.1 percent for white-tailed deer and 87.5 percent for bobcats. Along roads where python populations are believed to be smaller, declines were lower but still notable.

Rabbits and foxes, which were commonly spotted in 1996 and 1997, were not seen at all in the later counts. Researchers noted slight increases in coyotes, Florida panthers, rodents and other mammals, but discounted that finding because so few were spotted overall. "The magnitude of these declines underscores the apparent incredible density of pythons in Everglades National Park," said Michael Dorcas, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and lead author of the study. Although scientists cannot definitively say the pythons are killing off the mammals, the snakes are the prime suspect. The increase in pythons coincides with the mammals' decrease, and the decline appears to grow in magnitude with the size of the snakes' population in an area. A single disease appears unlikely to be the cause since several species were affected.

The report says the effect on the overall ecosystem is hard to predict. Declines among bobcats and foxes, which eat rabbits, could be linked to pythons' feasting on rabbits. On the flip side, declines among raccoons, which eat eggs, may help some turtles, crocodiles and birds. Scientists point with concern to what happened in Guam, where the invasive brown tree snake has killed off birds, bats and lizards that pollinated trees and flowers and dispersed seeds. That has led to declines in native trees, fish-eating birds and certain plants. In 2010, Florida banned private ownership of Burmese pythons. Earlier this month, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a federal ban on the import of Burmese pythons and three other snakes. Salazar said Monday that the study shows why such restrictions were needed. "This study paints a stark picture of the real damage that Burmese pythons are causing to native wildlife and the Florida economy," he said.

Source

 

[editec]

Yes this is a fascinating discovery.

It's still another damned good reason to insure that we don't destroy species by destroying their habitates.

Mother nature has been doing experiments on what works for life for billions of years and she still has much to teach us about biochemistry.

Perhaps we do need to back off a bit on this occupy wall street thing?

I don't really see the connection you're seeking to make.

You want to connect those dots for me?

 

[Iridescence]

As all living creatures came from the genetic codes of man, it is understandable why we are told to not reverse the orders by using animal genes to 'enhance' humans in the preventive cures toward disease... (perhaps the backward step is suggesting that disease is also derived from man.) I am forever amazed at the wonders we have so readily available in proving themselves to us in the basicness of mother nature.

It can be very thought provoking, to say the least.

 

[stanzoe]

True, we can use animal genes to cure and to be used in utmost condition for human, rather than developing it only for human enhancement!!!

 

[whitehall]

Snakes are cold blooded. They don't have anything in common with humans. Many researchers are cold blooded parasites. They will come to any conclusion you want as long as they can continue to feed off taxpayer blood.

 

[Iridescence]

Whitehall, that may be an unfair assumption. Researchers are sometimes put in positions that they have little to no choice but to be creative and inventive. Sometimes the things that are so readily discredited and mocked as worthless are the saving graces in different/specific atmospheres... etc. A lot of caution should be taken, maybe, but not necessarily by those in which caution would be too limiting toward potential progress. If liberation is ever needed, it may very well be within the labs and fields of creational study... which is no less for the mainstream than tax breaks and "free" spending money.

 

[waltky]

For the reticularly challenged...

The giant snake that stalked the Earth
2 April 2012 - The sheer size of titanoboa meant it had no trouble devouring prey as large as alligators

A recently discovered prehistoric monster snake provides answers about the past - and raises questions for the future. Around 58 million years ago a monstrous snake slithered out of the swampy jungles of South America and began a reign of terror. Weighing more than a ton and measuring 14m (approximately 50 feet) the giant reptile could swallow a whole crocodile without showing a bulge. But a few years ago scientists never even knew it existed. "Never in your wildest dreams do you expect to find a 14-metre boa constrictor. The biggest snake today is half that size," says Dr Carlos Jaramillo, a scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and part of the team that made the discovery.

'World of lost reptiles'

Thought to be a distant relative of the anaconda and boa constrictor, the snake - named "titanoboa" - was not venomous. Instead it crushed its prey with the constricting force of 400lbs per sq inch - the equivalent of lying under the weight of one and a half times the Brooklyn Bridge. The fossils were exposed by excavation at the massive Cerrejon open-face coal mine in northern Colombia. In 2002 scientists had discovered at that site the remains of a tropical rainforest from the Palaeocene epoch - perhaps the planet's first. As well as fossilised leaves and plants, they unearthed reptiles so big they defied imagination.

"What we found was a giant world of lost reptiles - turtles the size of a kitchen table and the biggest crocodiles in the history of fossil records," says Jonathan Bloch, an expert in vertebrate evolution at the University of Florida. They also found the vertebrae of a colossal snake. "After the extinction of the dinosaurs, this animal, the titanoboa, was the largest predator on the surface of the planet for at least 10 million years," says Dr Bloch. "This was a major animal in any sense of the imagination."

Search for skulls

But scientists needed the snake's skull to get a full picture of how it looked, what food it ate and how it might be related to modern species. Last year a team set out to find it, with little expectation of success. Because the bones of a snake's skull are so fragile, few survive. "Unlike our skulls, snake skulls aren't fused together. Instead they're connected with tissue," says Dr Jason Head, a snake specialist from the University of Nebraska. "When the animal dies the connective tissue decomposes and all the individual bones are generally dispersed. They're very thin and fragile too and often get destroyed. Because titanoboa is so big and the skull bones are so large, it's one of the few snakes that do make it into the fossil record." To their amazement the team recovered the remains of three skulls from which the reptile could be accurately reconstructed for the first time.

More BBC News - The giant snake that stalked the Earth

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Well snakes alive!...

Giant Burmese python caught in Florida
14 August 2012 - Researchers at the University of Florida are keen to discover more about the python's eating habits

The biggest Burmese python ever caught in Florida's wild has been captured in the Everglades, US scientists say. The snake measuring 17ft 7in (5.18m) and weighing 164lb (74kg) was found in Everglades National Park, the University of Florida announced. The python - now dead - was pregnant with 87 eggs, also believed to be a record. Non-native Burmese pythons have been blamed for a staggering decline of mammals in Florida's Everglades.

Scientists say the latest discovery shows just how pervasive the snakes - native to South East Asia - have become in South Florida. "It means these snakes are surviving a long time in the wild," said Kenneth Krysko, at the Florida Museum of Natural History. "There's nothing stopping them, and the native wildlife are in trouble." He said that the snake had feathers in its stomach that would help to identify the types of wildlife it was eating. "A 17-and-a-half-foot snake could eat anything it wants," he added.

Pythons kill their prey by coiling around it and suffocating it. They have been known to swallow animals as large as deer and alligators. After scientific investigation, the snake will be exhibited at the museum on the University of Florida campus for five years before being returned to the Everglades National Park. In 2009, another Burmese python named Delilah, measuring 18ft and weighing more than 400lb, was seized by Florida wildlife officials after it was found that its cage at a home near Lake Apopka was unsuitable.

BBC News - Giant Burmese python caught in Florida

See also:

Lethal snake viruses identified
14 August 2012 - The cause of a fatal illness that affects captive snakes has been identified, a study has shown.

The condition - called Inclusion Body Disease (IBD) - affects constrictor snakes including boas and pythons. There is no treatment and symptoms include "stargazing" - a fixed upward stare - as well as breathing problems and general muscular paralysis. It was long suspected that the disease was caused by a virus, but until recently its identity remained elusive. The research is published in the open access journal mBio. In this breakthrough study, researchers from the University of California San Francisco analysed samples obtained from snakes diagnosed with IBD, using sensitive DNA sequencing techniques. In amongst some of the snake DNA was foreign genetic material - nucleic acid - that closely resembled that present in viruses belonging to a family called arenaviruses. This family includes Lassa Fever virus, which is associated with haemorrhagic fever in humans. However, there is no evidence that the newly discovered virus can pass from snakes to humans.

The scientists were also able to grow the virus from samples taken from one of the snakes. Dr Mark Stenglein, who co-led the current study, said "we don't yet have formal evidence that these viruses cause the disease… although there is a good correlation [between disease and the presence of virus] … there's definitely a possibility that other things cause this". Arenaviruses can be divided into two main groups based on the location of the species they naturally infect - New World viruses originate from the Americas, whilst Old World viruses are found in Africa and Asia. Genetically, the newly discovered virus is distinct from these two groups.

Commenting on the finding, the editor of the paper Michael Buchmeier, professor of infectious diseases at University of California Irvine, suggests that these snake viruses "may be representative of a predecessor of the Old World and New World branches of the [arenavirus] family". The genetic analyses also revealed that one of the genes in the newly isolated virus group was more like that present in viruses belonging to a totally different family of haemorrhagic viruses called filoviruses. Ebolavirus belongs to this family. The new discovery follows similar research published online in April 2012 in the journal Infection, Genetics and Evolution, which describes isolation of a novel virus from snakes - this time in Australia - that showed symptoms very similar to IBD. However, the virus isolated in this study belonged to a very different virus family known as paramyxoviruses.

Professor Jim Wellehan from the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, who authored the paramyxovirus study, said: "The epidemiology of the paramyxoviruses is different [to IBD]. These are hot agents that snakes die quickly from, and it works fast. You have a room full of dead snakes in a week." It is uncertain how the highly contagious IBD virus is spread. One possibility is that transmission occurs through inhalation - either directly from another infected snake or indirectly from contaminated bedding or following handling. Alternatively, mites - often found in colonies suffering from an IBD outbreak - might be implicated. So far the disease seems to be restricted to captive snakes but some scientists are worried that the release of captive bred or rehabilitated snakes might unwittingly unleash this devastating virus into the wild.

BBC News - Lethal snake viruses identified

 

[Iridescence]

Lots of reading here... I gots to catchup.

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - it's kinda hard to drain the swamp, when yer up to yer butt in crocodiles...

South African crocodiles 'in mass escape' during floods
24 January 2013 - Crocodiles are farmed for their meat and their skin

About 15,000 crocodiles have reportedly escaped from a farm in South Africa's far north amid heavy rains and flooding. The owner was forced to open the crocodile farm's gates on Sunday to prevent a storm surge, the local Beeld newspaper says. Many of the crocodiles have been recaptured, but more than half are still on the loose, it says. The floods have killed at least 10 people in Limpopo province. The crocodiles escaped from the Rakwena Crocodile Farm, a tourist site about 15km (nine miles) from the small town of Pontdrif, which borders Botswana.

'School rugby field'

Zane Langman, the son-in-law of the farm's owner, told the newspaper that many of the crocodiles had escaped into dense bush and the Limpopo River, the second biggest in South Africa. "There used to be only a few crocodiles in the Limpopo River. Now there are a lot. We go to catch them as soon as farmers call us to inform us about crocodiles," said Mr Langman. "I heard there were crocodiles in Musina [about 120km away] on the school's rugby field."

Mr Langman said he went to rescue friends in a flooded house in the area by boat on Sunday. "When we reached them, the crocodiles were swimming around them. Praise the Lord, they were all alive," he is quoted as saying. The South African Air Force is being used to rescue people affected by the flooding in remote settlements, some of which are cut off from the outside world. The floods have also affected neighbouring Mozambique, where tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes.

BBC News - South African crocodiles 'in mass escape' during floods

 

[waltky]

Dat snake scares possum when Granny gets to doin' her belly-dancin' routine...

Year of Snake sees serpent sales soar in Hong Kong
Sun, Feb 10, 2013 - As Hong Kong prepares to usher in the Year of the Snake, an increasing number of the reptiles are slithering their way into local households, with sales of the uncuddly pet rocketing.

Keeping snakes has become increasingly popular in the densely populated territory in recent years as animal lovers seek out less space-hungry pets. And with the spotlight firmly on the reptile in the lead-up to the Lunar New Year today, sales have surged. At Reptile Paradise, a store that first opened its doors in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok neighborhood in 1994, dozens of baby snakes, not more than a few weeks old, frantically try to climb their way out of small plastic boxes. As well as turtles and lizards the shop sells milk snakes, corn snakes, king snakes and ball pythons, plus containers of live white mice to feed them. Its director, Vincent Cheung, said snake sales have been rising steadily for several months prior to the arrival of the New Year. “The increase for the past month and what I expect for the coming month is about 20 percent to 25 percent, compared with the last year,” Cheung said.

He has sold 100 to 150 snakes in the past three months and remembers a similar spike in 2001, the previous Year of the Snake, with 20- and 30-something Hong Kongers the most eager customers. “When the Year of the Snake comes, they really want to save their money to buy a snake for it. Keeping snakes is very simple compared to keeping other types of reptiles,” Cheung said, adding that clients often learn how to raise and breed them on the Internet. With real estate at a premium and rentals sky high, snakes appear to fit with the compact high-rise lifestyle of most of the territory’s residents — popular breeds in Hong Kong like the North American corn snake and milk snake only measure 25cm when they are young, growing to around 119.38cm. However, while popular pet reptiles such as the turtle represent luck, longevity and fortune, the snake has a mixed reputation in Chinese culture.

Although it can signify intelligence and happiness, it is also associated with tragedy — some believe that if a snake is found in the home it means impending disaster for the family concerned, though others feel that such a discovery brings good luck and peace. In culinary terms it is held up as a delicacy in southern Chinese cuisine as well as a health booster, with thick soup made from snake meat thought to quicken the blood and ward off illness in winter. In Hong Kong, practicality and a certain cool factor are fueling sales, as well as moneymaking potential. “Some people think it’s a good idea to impress the girls with snakes and some people want to keep them to make money through breeding,” said Gourry Chan, a director at Mong Kok’s Turtle Park pet store.

Demand has also spiked in his shop in the lead up to New Year, though he criticized those who simply want to get on the Year of the Snake bandwagon. “There are a number of people who are genuinely interested in keeping snakes — but lately there have been more people coming in, and if they say they are doing it for the Year of the Snake, we discourage them, he said. “A snake can live up to 20 years and it takes dedication to keep one. Some are sold online when their owners get bored or they die from neglect,” he said. Animal protection groups also warn against buying a snake on a whim.

More Year of Snake sees serpent sales soar in Hong Kong - Taipei Times

 

[Big Black Dog]

The only good snake is a dead snake.