King Crossword
ACROSS
1 Discover
6 South American
prairies
12 Physician
13 Italian cheese 14 Golden Arches burger 15 Roil
16 Cruising
17 Despot
19 Small batteries 20 Track tipster 22 Hooter
24 Tummy muscles 27 French cheese
29 Skin soother
32 Prime Minister’s
address
35 Actress Falco
36 911 responders 37 Mormon church, for
short
38 Refusals
40 God of war
42 Annex
44 — Nostra
Answers below 46 Pismires 50 After-shower powder 52 Arizona tribe
54 Texas city
55 Abase oneself 56 Director Scorsese 57 Haunting
DOWN
1 Floral rings
2 Rim
3 Shoot for
4 Nipper’s co. 5 Chopin composition 6 “Qué —?” (“What’s
going on?”) 7 Houston player 8 Roman 1002
9 Kind of parking 10 Water, to Juan 11 Bribes
12 CEO’s deg.
18 Marks of shame 21 Japanese sash 23 Kids’ card game 24 Citric beverage 25 Physique
26 Scam artist 28 Alienate
30 British ref. work 31 UFO fliers
33 “The Matrix” character
34 Mao — -tung 39 Italian for “Pardon
me”
41 Relish
42 Fermi’s bit
43 Baby’s father 45 Yemen neighbor 47 “Avatar” race 48 Biblical pronoun 49 Scale member 51 Chicago winter hrs. 53 “All bets — off”
In 2016, on the northern tip of Guam, two biologists, Tom Seibert and Julie Savidge, challenged several brown tree snakes to a battle of wits. The arena: a concrete pen with a narrow metal pole. The prize, at the top of the pole: two mice, a seed cake and a potato in a cage. (The potato and seed cake were for the mice.) The obstacle: a 3-foot-tall metal stovepipe baffle cinched around the pole like a cummerbund.
The biologists wanted to see if the baffle could protect nest boxes designed for Guam’s population of Micronesian starlings, which has been decimated since brown tree snakes were introduced in the late 1940s.
But while the scientists were sleeping, the nocturnal snake managed to wiggle up the pole, wrap its noodling body around the baffle almost like a lasso and inch its way up toward the mice. Although the snake’s strategy of ascent has troubling implications for the conservation of the Micronesian starling, it also reveals an entirely new mode of snake locomotion that has never been described before. The researchers describe this new “lasso locomotion” in a study published last month in Current Biology.
Seibert, a professor emeritus at Colorado State University, and his colleague Martin Kastner, also a biologist, made the discovery while reviewing timelapsed infrared footage of the snake pit. The footage was initially boring, showing the snakes nosing around the bottom of the baffle but unable to climb it. Suddenly, several hours into the footage, one snake wrapped its body around the baffle, grabbed the end of its body with its tail and wiggled its way up.
“We were bamboozled by what we were seeing,” Seibert said, adding that he and Kastner kept replaying the video. “Snakes just don’t move this way.”
Seibert asked Bjorn Lardner, a herpetologist who studies brown tree snakes on Guam, to see if he could figure out what the snakes were doing, but Lardner was stumped. Seibert sent the video to Savidge, also a professor emeritus at Colorado State University, to see if she had any idea. Savidge, who has studied these snakes for 30 years, was stumped.
In 2018, the researchers sent the video to Bruce Jayne, a snake locomotion biologist at the University of Cincinnati. “It was a real mind-bender,” said Jayne, who is an author on the paper.
“It just loops around the cylinder and then magically wiggles up.”
At first, he wondered if the snakes might be moving up the baffle the same way utility workers might scale a telephone pole using a belt and pushing off the pole with their feet. But, crucially, snakes do not have feet, so the idea went belly-up.
For almost a century, scientists have categorized snake locomotion into just four modes. In rectilinear locomotion, the snake moves in a straight line by stretching its skin and then sliding its skeleton forward. In lateral undulation, all points of the snake’s body bend from side to side. In sidewinding, snakes bend from side to side but also arch their back to lift their body from the ground. In concertina — aptly named after the accordion — the distance between the snake’s head and tail changes as the snake alternates between gripping something static and extending the rest of its body.
The brown tree snake’s movements seemed strange, but the time-lapse footage did not make it entirely obvious if the movements marked a new mode of locomotion. So in 2019, Seibert returned to Guam to replicate the experiment, this time with a 4K-resolution camera and two baffles stacked on top of each other.
The new video showed that a brown tree snake could climb the baffle by forming a loop with its body, crossing over itself at least once and forming small bends in its body to inch its way up. The motion seemed to exhaust the snakes, which paused frequently, breathed heavily and sometimes slipped down the pole. After viewing the video, Jayne tried and failed to get the brown tree snakes in his lab to climb a pole using lasso locomotion. “Maybe they’ve gotten fat, old and lazy,” he said.
Jayne believes lasso locomotion is an entirely new type of slithering. “Lasso locomotion is in outer space,” he said. “It’s different enough that it doesn’t fit into any of the four categories.” When a snake climbs a tree using concertina, the distance between its head and tail shrinks and swells as it alternates between gripping uphill and gripping downhill on the tree, sometimes at the same time. In contrast, in lasso locomotion, the looping region of the body the snake uses to grip does not change, and the animal moves itself upward with little sideways bends around the circumference of its cylinder.
“Given the right circumstances, it’s clear that snakes can find a way, and this new form of locomotion is an example of that,” said Gregory Byrnes, a biologist at Siena College who was not involved with the research.
It’s possible that other snakes in the same genus as the brown tree snake are also capable of lasso locomotion, Jayne said.