Imagine a scene in a humid coastal rainforest where a mother caecilian is nursing her litter of pink, hairless babies. These snake-shaped amphibians, more closely related to frogs than foxes, are a fascinating species with unique biological features. Caecilians are legless, burrowing amphibians that are nearly blind and some species, like the ringed caecilian, have poisonous slime and may even be venomous. What’s even more intriguing is that they feed their own skin to their young. Herpetologist Carlos Jared and his team at the Instituto Butantan in São Paulo have been studying these mysterious creatures for years. In a recent study, they observed that ringed caecilian hatchlings spend a lot of time around the end of their mother’s body near the vent, where she periodically expels a thick fluid that the young eagerly feed on, some even sticking their heads inside the opening.
2024-03-07 14:00:00
Link from www.sciencenews.org