Wednesday - February 12, 2014

Is It April 1st Already???

I am never, ever going hiking in Louisiana. Not ever.

As far as discoveries go, this is a somewhat terrifying one, assuming one has a healthy respect for crocodiles on the ground: They can climb and perch in trees, and really climb, with researchers spotting them more than a dozen feet from the ground.

While anecdotal reports have placed the reptiles in trees in Mississippi, Colombia, and along the Nile, only three references to such behavior appear in scientific literature.

And so researchers set out to determine whether it was a regular practice, observing crocodilians (which includes crocs and alligators) on three continents: Australia, Africa, and North America.

What they found, as reported in Herpetology Notes: Four species were identified as able to climb trees, and were spotted, in once case, as high as 13 feet above the ground—and as far as 16 feet down a branch.

Getting there meant scaling “a completely vertical bank and then [walking] amongst the branches to reach the end of the tree,” wrote the team, led by University of Tennessee researcher Vladimir Dinets.

Another wild observation, per Wired: Along the Nile, crocodiles were seen in the trees as often as some birds were. The crocodiles were observed climbing trees (and, in one case in Australia, trying to climb a chain-link fence) during day and night, typically in “areas where there were few places to bask on the ground, implying that the individuals needed alternatives for regulating their body temperature,” they wrote, per e! Science News.

Abstract. Although arboreality in extinct crocodilians is frequently suggested, the climbing abilities of extant crocodilians have never been discussed in any detail in scientific literature. We present an overview of published and anecdotal information on climbing in extant crocodilians, as well as original observations on four species representing two crocodile genera. These data suggest that climbing behaviour is common among crocodilians and might have multiple functions. The fact that at least some extant crocodilians are capable of climbing arboreal vegetation despite lacking any obvious morphological adaptations for arboreality must be taken into account by paleontologists trying to elucidate behavioural clues from the morphology of fossil taxa.

That kind of arboreality really is an abstract reality!

Posted by Drew458     on 02/12/2014 at 07:20 PM   
Filed Under: • Amazing Science and Discoveries •  
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