Desert Snake Preys on Spiny Mouse With Gruesome Results | Arabian Inferno 102

It sometimes feels like mammals rule the world; there are well over 5,000 species, colonising every corner of the globe. But in Arabia there’s a different story – this is a land where reptiles rule.

172 species of reptile live in Arabia, more than half are found here and nowhere else.

From the 2 foot vegetarian dhub to the powerful and bad tempered monitor lizard, a predator twice its size, to geckos with night vision and sticky feet and huge sea turtles, designed for a life in the water, coming ashore only to lay their eggs.

All reptiles bask in sun. Being cold-blooded doesn’t mean they’re cold, it means they can’t regulate their temperature internally. Instead they’re warmed or cooled by the environment. They’re like living solar panels, absorbing the suns heat and using it as an energy source to power their bodies.

By not having to heat their own bodies, they save energy, one of the secrets of their enduring success. A snake, like the deadly Diadem, can survive on just 50% of its body weight in food each year. When he kills a mouse, he has enough food to keep him going for months. It’s this ability to save energy in a landscape where resources are scarce, that gives cold-blooded creatures the upper hand.

As the sun moves across the sky, the behaviours of different species change. From a sea snake, with some of the deadliest venom on the plant, who must wait for high tide to lift it from a rock pool, to a giant loggerhead turtle that only emerges under the cover of darkness to lay eggs.

Among the most charismatic of them all, an Arabian Chameleon, hunts spiders, firing at them with a built-in weapon – a sticky tongue that can do 0-60 in one hundredth of a second. Despite the heat of the desert, all of these creatures live their lives in cold blood.

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