Venomous wide-bodied rattlesnakes on several serpent-filled Mexican islands have provided biologists from Florida with surprising new evidence about the evolution of animals.
A team from the University of South Florida joined scientists from Mexico on three separate camping expeditions to 11 uninhabited islands in the Gulf of California, a region known as the world’s biggest rattlesnake nest.
Upon capturing dozens of the snakes in cooler temperatures after sunset and extracting and analyzing their venom, they made an unexpected discovery. Rather than developing more complex toxins for a wide variety of potential prey, as the researchers assumed, the rattlesnakes were instead producing simpler venoms containing fewer and more focused venoms.
