SANTOS, T. P. dos et al. Acta Amazonica. 2024Only the female (right) makes short, shrill soundsSANTOS, T. P. dos et al. Acta Amazonica. 2024
In October 2023, biologists Tatiane Santos, Marcos Penhacek, Domingos Rodrigues, and Gisele Lourenço of the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT), Sinop campus, examined the contents of buckets buried in the ground to capture animals in a forest in Aripuanã, in the northwest of the state. They found two reticulate worm snakes (Amerotyphlops reticulatus), a male and a female copulating. When they removed them from the bucket, they noticed that the snakes were making lateral movements with their mouths open, and the female alone was making short, shrill sounds. They were louder than the defensive sounds of other species and above the frequency at which the snakes themselves can hear. It is the first documented record of sound being made by a fossorial snake—meaning it lives underground—in the Brazilian Amazon. In 2023, biologists from the University of Missouri, USA, recorded the vocalizations of another species from the same taxonomic family in northern Australia: the claw-snouted blind snake (Anilios unguirostris). The snake was released before its sex was identified. Both species are nonvenomous (Acta Amazonica, December).
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