| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東科技大學 === 野生動物保育研究所 === 106 === The color of the animal's body surface affects its ecological behavior.
Many animals are hidden through color to avoid predators or increase the
success rate of foraging. Snake body is covered by scales, which have
important functions such as physical protection, light reflection or thermal
exchange adjustment, crypsis or camouflage. The scale has the
microstructure on its surface called microornamentation (MO), which may
relate to ecological adaptation or phylogeny of snakes. In this study, I
measured the reflectivity of scales on the shed skins of 176 snake species
for different wavelengths of light (300 nm, 500 nm, 800 nm), to analyze
the differences of light reflectivity of scales on snakes with different
habitats (terrestrial, fossorial/burrowing, aquatic, semi-aquatic, arboreal),
dorsal body patterns (single color, mottled, banded, striped), families
(Cylindrophiidae, Boidae, Colubridae, Elapidae, Pythonidae, Viperidae,
Xenopeltidae, Lamprophiidae, Homalopsidae, Pareatidae,
Xenodermatidae, Typhlopidae), MO types, scale thickness, and direction
of incident light. I hypothesized that the light reflectivity of snake scales is
affected by both ecological and phylogenetic factors. The results showed
that 1) the dorsal scales of snakes with mottled body pattern displayed
lower light reflectance, while the dorsal scales of snakes with banded body
IV
pattern presented higher light reflectivity; 2) The light reflectivities of
scales on aquatic snakes and semi-aquatic snakes were different from those
with other habitat types; 3) the reflectivities of scales from snakes of
different families were also different; 4) the reflectivity was related to the
MO on scales; 5) the reflectivities of scales with different directions of
incident light were different. The phylogenetic regression modeling also
showed that the better models predicting light reflectivity of scales
included both ecological and phylogenetic factors, where the effects of MO
for dorsal scales or habitat for ventral scales dominated.
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