Do you know how to sex a
snake?
No, I don't mean the trouser
snake most of you probably immediately thought of, and I wasn't fishing for bad
pick up lines. It's a serious question for anyone who has more than one snake,
such as the Zookeeper. As one of the zoo employees discovered, housing male
snakes with female snakes can make for a very interesting work day when you
arrive to find that what you thought was a boy snake has just given birth (yes,
some snakes do give live birth) and now you get the job of sorting out all the
little baby snakes as well as cleaning up the mess...
Determining the gender of a
snake, called "sexing," is not an easy task. At least it didn't seem like it
when I asked the Zookeeper how it was done.
Me: "How do you sex a
snake?"
Him: "Well, snakes have two
hemipenes that are internal and..."
Me: "Wait, they have two?
How cool for them."
Him: (grinning but ignoring
me) "And you use a special..."
Me: (Waving my hand in the air to ward off the lecture) "Stick, right? To see?
But how do you tell?"
Him: (grimacing at the
interruptions) "Well, not a stick. A metal probe with a ball at the end so you
don't hurt the animal, and it needs to be done by a vet..."
Me: "Yeah, yeah, but how do
you tell?"
Him: "Well, with males it
goes in farther."
Interesting. So, of course
before I came here to write about it I wanted to know a little more, which means
asking that wonderful internet question answerer Google. It turns out that
snakes may have two, but they use them one at a time (so much for...never mind)
because lady snakes only have one thingy called a cloaca. And since this isn't
supposed to be a reptile anatomy lesson, let me just tell you a really cool
factoid about a cloaca is that some turtles can actually breathe
through the damn thing. Mostly only diving turtles, which is probably a bummer
for the giant Sulcata tortoises we have here, since there was one time they could have used that evolutionary ability. Looky!
My head is in the water but my ass is in the air and I can hang out all day like
this because I can breathe! Though it does make me wonder if breathing through
your butt is better or worse for when the air smells bad...and gives a whole new
meaning to the expression "blow it out your ass" as well as possibly explaining
why it isn't nice to blow smoke up someone's...
Another interesting thing
about snakes and reproduction is that lady snakes can store sperm for years.
Meaning they get to choose when they give birth or lay eggs or whatever. Except
that reptiles have a very primitive brain so they probably aren't really
choosing so much as going with the flow as food and conditions allow but
still...those of us who had our children in our 30's can possibly appreciate the
idea of waiting.
Except that waiting until
you are older means you are more tired, and farther away from your own
childhood. Granting me you less patience for dealing with the
mind-numbing stupid shit your children want to talk to you about
incessantly day to day foibles of raising children. Everything from
philosophical questions before breakfast (Mom! What if your belly button could
talk to you?) to repeating the same lines from the same TV show a million times,
to asking you The. Exact. Same. Question. Fifty thousand times (What's for
dinner? Why do I have to take a shower? When are we leaving to go to Grammy's
house/shopping/the birthday party? How much longer till we're there? Why do I
have to brush my teeth again?) To the need to ask them 5,000 times to pick their
shoes up/put away the dishes/clean their rooms/change their underwear/get their
dirty socks out of the refrigerator.
They mob you the second you
come home, three of them clamoring for your attention, talking over each other
in a effort to be the loudest. And they are loud. It's like kids have one volume
(11) and one speed (slow forward, with a retrograde into reverse every now and
then.) They can remember every word to every song on the radio (even those you
wished they couldn't. Like when your five year old is singing Rihanna's S&M
from the back seat on the way to the beach) but can't remember to feed the dog
or do their homework. And I swear to God they lay in their beds at night
thinking of ways to push Mommy to the edge, and then compare notes in the
morning.
"If you do this, and then I
do that, and then we both tell the Bug scary stories until she screams, I bet we
can send Mommy into a conniption fit."
We have at least six nail
clippers. I can't find a single one. TV remotes disappear, homework gets lost,
and oh, by the way we have an open house at school in five minutes that I forgot
to tell you about and I need to bring a snack to feed 100, wear a fuchsia shirt
I don't own and I don't have any shoes that will match. Except I can't really go
since I lost my library book and they won't let me in unless you pay the fine.
And there's a birthday party after, so I need a present. What's for
dinner?
Emperor Scorpions will eat
their young, if mamma is hungry and the baby falls off her back. True story,
since it recently happened here at the zoo.
I have a theory. Ever notice
how babies smell good? Even when they have a "tinky duper diaper" and don't
smell so good? It's pheromones. We love the milky scent of babies (and doesn't
Pampers capitalize on that with the scent of their diapers?) and so want to pick
them up and settle them down, walk endless floors with them through endless
nights when the gripe water isn't working and all they do is cry and scream. The
smell leads us to get up in the middle of the night to check on them a thousand
times, as they sleep peacefully and we worry and stay awake playing games of
what if (in the same way we used to keep ourselves up wondering about the shadow
in the corner or the boogeyman under the bed.) That baby smell carries us
through the toddler years, when "NO!" becomes their favorite word, but as soon
as the new baby smell wears off, we have another thing to hold onto. "I wuv
you." Aw. That makes all the snot squeezing, temper tantrums in Target, not
gonna wear shoes worth it. That carries us through the increasingly hard
elementary school years, and reminds us in middle school, when sullen and
secretive set in, that they "wuv" us. All the way through high school when they
hate us. And by then the new smell has worn off and we are just as ready for
them to leave as they are to do so.
Or not. I never said I'd win
any mother of the year awards. But I "wuv" them too, warts and all. And so for
today, I'm not gonna eat them.
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