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New blind snake discovery Jeremy Hance mongabay.com April 06, 2010 World-traveling blindsnake points to Madagascar's origins and great voyages across the Atlantic. "Blindsnakes are not very pretty, are rarely noticed, and are often mistaken for earthworms," says Blair Hedges of her subjects. "Nonetheless, they tell a very interesting evolutionary story." Hedges, professor of biology at Penn State University, was a lead author of the study, which looked at the evolution of blindsnakes by examining the genetics of 96 blindsnake species of some 260 known species. Blindsnakes are burrowing worm-like snakes that despite being largely-unknown to the public and long-ignored by scientists, occur on every continent except Antarctica. Feeding on ants and termites, blindsnakes are not actually blind, but simply have poor vision likely due to their underground lifestyle. However, researchers were puzzled by how these underground snakes have popped up in so many locations.
According to the research, blindsnakes first evolved on Gondwana, the ancient southern supercontinent. Continental splits beginning around 155 million years ago fractured blindsnakes populations. For example, at one point a landmass broke off of East Gondwana that incorporated both India and Madagascar. Around 94 million years ago, that land mass broke up and Madagascar drifted to its current position off the coast of East Africa while India eventually collided with Asia. Researchers now know that a population of ancient Gondwanan blindsnakes eventually drifted on Madagascar to its present location. Due to nearly a hundred million years of isolation, Madagascar has evolved some truly bizarre species—such as the long-fingered aye-aye or the lemur-hunting fossa—that live nowhere else. In fact, even 90 percent of Madagascar's plants are endemic. The blindsnakes that live on Madagascar—after millions of years of independent evolution—are also unique enough for the researchers to have dubbed them their own family.
"Some scientists have argued that oceanic dispersal is an unlikely way for burrowing organisms to become distributed around the world," observes Hedges. "Our data now reinforce the message that such 'unlikely' events nonetheless happened in evolutionary history." Eventually, blindsnakes reached their last continent, Australia, around 28 million years ago. Lacking any land route, the researchers believe the blindsnakes made a second oceanic crossing on floating vegetation to reach the southerly continent. Related articles Natural rafts carried Madagascar's unique wildlife to its shores 
(01/20/2010) Imagine, forty million years ago a great tropical storm rises up on the eastern coast of Africa. Hundreds of trees are blown over and swept out to sea, but one harbors something special: inside a dry hollow rests a small lemur-like primate. Currents carry this tree and its passenger hundreds of miles until one gray morning it slides onto a faraway, unknown beach. The small mammal crawls out of its hollow and waddles, hungry and thirsty, onto the beach. Within hours, amid nearby tropical forests, it has found the sustenance it needs to survive: in a place that would one day be named Madagascar.
Photos: Madagascar's wonderful and wild frogs, an interview with Sahonagasy 
(03/03/2010) To save Madagascar's embattled and beautiful amphibians, scientists are turning to the web. A new site built by herpetologists, Sahonagasy, is dedicated to gathering and providing information about Madagascar's unique amphibians in a bid to save them from the growing threat of extinction. "The past 20 years have seen resources wasted because of a poor coordination of efforts," explains Miguel Vences, herpetologist and professor at the Technical University of Braunschweig. "Many surveys and reports have been produced that were never published, many tourists found and photographed amphibians but these photos were not made available to mapping projects, many studies carried out by Malagasy students did not make use of literature because it was not available."
Forgotten species: Madagascar's water-loving mammal, the aquatic tenrec 
(11/12/2009) There are many adjectives one could attach to the aquatic tenrec: rare, mysterious, elusive, one-of-a-kind, even adorable, though one tries to stray from such value-laden titles since it excludes so many other non-adorable inhabitants of the animal kingdom. This small and, yes, cute insectivore, also known as the web-footed tenrec, lives in Eastern Madagascar where at night it spends the majority of its time swimming and diving in fast-moving streams for insects and tadpoles. It sleeps during the day in small streamside burrows. To date that is about the extent of our knowledge of this species.
Tags: Evolution madagascar africa animals wildlife strange herps reptiles jeremy hance green environment snakes islands Environmental news index | RSS | News Feed | Twitter | Home Advertisements:
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