Why Does A Starving Diamond-Back Continue To Grow?
Faced with up to two years without food, rattlesnake cuts metabolism by 80%, changes energy source to lipids * * * Hints of diet engineering in diabetes, post-recovery and space travel SAN FRANCISCO (April 4, 2006) Nearly every organism has developed its own mechanism to cope with starvation or reduce food availability, whether for hours or months. In the arctic winter, penguins and polar bears store up huge amounts of fat but stay active. Hibernators such as squirrels and groundhogs fatten up for the winter then lower their metabolism by sleeping off. But desert snakes dont display any such outward manifestation that might hint at how they manage to survive blistering summers, and food shortages while remaining relatively active. Presenting a paper in an American Physiological Society session at Experimental Biology 2006, Marshall McCue notes that birds, fish and mammals including humans have been studied in terms of food-deprivation, but surprisingly, snakes havent been studied in th
