So. PhDs. I came up with a cool topic last September (I guess my supervisor contributed a bit too). I was going to look at how venom composition changes in brown tree snakes as they get older. They’re a fairly common species along the east coast of Australia, so getting sufficient numbers of them for a research project shouldn’t be too much of an issue. On the east coast they tend to be plain brown.

Brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) - eastern form

There’s also a ‘northern’ form of this species. It looks radically different to the (somewhat dull) eastern form, with a light background colour and reddish-brown stripes along the body.

Brown tree snake (Boiga irregularis) - northern form

These snakes tend to eat different things as they get older (and therefore bigger), which might influence the makeup of their venom. As they age, their venom might change to become more effective against their new prey species.

I’ve done a fair bit of trawling through the literature to find info on this topic. And so you can imagine my surpise when I scan through the latest issue of Toxicon to find an article entitled Venom of the Brown Treesnake, Boiga irregularis: ontogenetic shifts and taxa-specific toxicity.

So I’m currently coming up with a different project.

This entry was posted on Thursday May 18th, 2006 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Academia, Animal photos, Reptile Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.