Hi everyone, welcome back to Curious By Nature.
My name is Marjorie, and today we're going to do a Critter Connection with Cartman the corn snake.
Can anyone list their five senses?
So, we have seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting, and touching.
And we're going to learn more in today's Critter Connection.
Corn snakes, like people, use their five senses to see the world.
Right now he's actually smelling the world with his tongue
Snakes use their tongue to smell.
What do you use to smell?
You don't use your tongues, do you?
You probably use your nose.
Cartman has a nose, but he doesn't use it to smell.
He uses his tongue and if you look closely at his tongue...does it look like ours?
It probably doesn't.
A snake's tongue is forked, so it has two different pieces, left and right,
and that's so he can smell in two different directions.
Just like how we can hear if something is coming from our right side or our left side
because we have ears on either side of our head,
snakes can do the same thing with smelling with their tongues,
so they can tell which direction a scent is coming from and follow that scent.
They also use a special organ on the roof of their mouth, called a Jacobson's organ, in order to analyze that smell.
Snakes, they don't really taste like we do.
They actually swallow their food whole.
They can unhinge their jaw and swallow food bigger than their head.
If we were snakes, we could swallow a whole watermelon or a whole Thanksgiving turkey,
but I don't think anyone here has ever swallowed that before.
If you look carefully at his head, can anyone see any ears?
Or can anyone see any holes for ears?
Snakes actually don't have ears on the outside, so they don't have ears like we do.
They have inner ears, and so they actually hear vibrations with their jawbone.
So if you put your hand on your throat and you hum,
(hums)
you can actually feel vibrations just like a snake would.
If the snake is on my arm here then he can probably hear me talking,
but he wouldn't be able to hear anyone else talking in the room.
We've talked about smelling, tasting, and hearing.
Another sense that snakes have is touching, just like we do.
What do we usually use to touch?
We usually use our hands, but if you take a look at Cartman, what do you see?
Does he have any skin?
He doesn't, so snakes they don't have exposed skin.
They are covered in scales and the scales are made out of keratin,
which is the same stuff as your hair or your fingernails.
If you press down on your fingernails, that actually is sort of similar to how a snake feels the world.
So they're not as sensitive with touch like we are.
The last sense.
What's the last sense we haven't talked about?
It is seeing.
So we have two eyes, and if you look at Cartman, can you count his eyes?
He has one, two eyes, and just like us he has eyes that face forward,
which means just like us he has what's called depth perception.
He can tell how close or how far away something is, and he can also see in color just like us.
But snakes, their sight isn't quite as good.
Another cool thing about snakes is you can have a staring contest.
So you can try and have a staring contest with Cartman right now.
Has anyone blinked yet?
I bet Cartman hasn't and that's because he doesn't have any eyelids.
He can't actually close his eyes,
and so because of that snakes will always win a staring contest with a person.
Instead, snakes have a clear scale over their eyes that helps protect them,
and you can tell when they're about to shed their skin because it turns a little cloudy.
So if you see a snake shed, sometimes you can see the eye scale in the shed, too.
We talked about the snake's five senses, smelling, tasting, hearing,
touch, and seeing.
That's our show for today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I hope you enjoyed learning about Cartman the corn snake.
Be sure to leave any questions in the comments below
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We'll see you back here next time on Curious By Nature.