8/16/2023 0 Comments Boa constrictor snake.![]() The front one-third of the long lung, closest to the snake's head, contains tissue that can perform gas exchange, meaning it can pass oxygen into the bloodstream and remove, or exhale, waste products, like carbon dioxide. Boa constrictors fall into the first group, in that they have a teeny-tiny left lung and a lengthy right lung that's roughly one-third as long as the snake's body, the JEB report notes. "It can just lift that individual rib." When a levator costa contracts, it pulls the rib back, like a door on a hinge, while also causing the bone to slightly rotate these delicate motions control when and where the snakes' lungs can inflate.Īll snakes have fully-developed right lungs, but depending on the species, a snake may either have a puny left lung or no left lung at all, according to a 2015 report in the journal PLOS One. In their new study, the team revealed how each levator costa "can basically control motions a lot more discreetly," Capano said. These animals use the intercostal muscles to move entire "blocks" of ribs at one time, rather than having fine-tuned, independent control of individual rib bones.īy comparison, boas and other snakes primarily use levator costae muscles to breathe each levator costa runs from the vertebral column to one of the snake's more than 400 ribs. When animals breathe with their ribcage, they typically use small muscles called intercostals that run between adjacent ribs, Capano said. Instead, snakes use muscles attached to their ribs to alter the volume of their ribcage and allow air in and out of the lungs. Unlike humans, snakes lack diaphragms, the large, dome-shaped muscles that contract and flatten to allow a person's lungs to expand and fill with air and then relax and compress the lungs to push air out. In their report, the study authors theorize that other snake species likely use this same breathing method, and that the method likely evolved in tandem with snakes' highly mobile skulls, which contort so the animals can wrap their jaws around enormous prey and swallow it in one gulp, he added. ![]() This precise breathing strategy likely also helps boas survive the process of swallowing and digesting large prey, since these hefty meals restrict the movement of the animals' ribs from the inside, Capano told Live Science. ![]() "It doesn't seem like you could evolve constriction to kill really big things if you're compromising lung ventilation," Capano said. This ability to control which section of their ribcage is involved in breathing likely allowed boas to evolve to their present forms, said study first author John Capano, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology at Brown University. ![]()
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