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Big snake, little snake July 9, 2017

July 9, 2017

I’m sitting in an airport on my way to Merida, Mexico for the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation conference, so I have some time to kill. I also had to get up at 4:15 in the morning to make my flight out of Costa Rica, so I’m a little tired. The last few days have been weird, since it’s almost been like getting ready to leave for good. Less packing, but more making sure that my assistant has everything she needs to hold down the fort for the week.

Anyway, the snakes. Yesterday, we saw a big boa constrictor in the road:

There’s not much in the photo for scale, but it was at least 5 feet long. On the other end of the spectrum, here’s the slender blindsnake we found in the lab the day before:

That was maybe three inches long. When we looked at it under a low-magnification microscope, the scales almost looked like they’d been woven together, like the outer wrapping of a round shoelace.