Sea Snakes Seek Out Freshwater To Slake Thirst

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Published: 06-Nov-08 03:00 PM
Source: ScienceDaily

Sea snakes may slither in saltwater, but they sip the sweet stuff. It has been the “long-standing dogma” that the roughly 60 species of venomous sea snakes worldwide satisfy their drinking needs by drinking seawater, with internal salt glands filtering and excreting the salt. Experiments with three species of captive sea kraits captured near Taiwan, however, found that the snakes refused to drink saltwater even if thirsty — and then would drink only freshwater or heavily diluted saltwater.

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I don't know if i buy it just yet. It's a big call to have studied three snake from one geographical area and then say that it applies to all sea snake species. Very interesting read though.
 
It's a very big call to say that results from semi terrestrial snakes (ones which hatch from eggs, on land, and return to land) mean anything to exclusively aquatic snakes which are born in the water and never see land. It begs the question, why did they not use pelagic sea snakes? Why did they use kraits?

It's also possible that the snakes can only desalinate water slowly, which would mean that the 20 hours was not enough for them to rehydrate. The article actually indicates that some of the snakes did take in some water when all they had was fully concentrated sea water. Perhaps the desalination process only occurs at around the same rate that the snakes lose water (which would make sense! It's an energetically expensive thing to do, so why would you have a system which does it faster than you'll ever need it?).

They may be right, but your average undergraduate could have designed a better experiment, and the flaws in their experimental design mean the findings are of very little use and to get any worthwhile data they'd have to completely start again.
 
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