Welcome to You Ask Andy

Larry Ivey, age 8, of Shreveport, La., for his question:

What is a glass snake?

This snaky fellow is so fragile that he may break apart even when not roughly handled. In North America he is found in the Southland and all up and down the Mississippi valley. He also has a close relative in China. In both China and America, people tell strange tales about the glass snake. When his long, snaky body is broken in pieces they say, he can put the pieces together and grow whole again. But, says Andy, this wonderful story is not true   not true at all.

What’s more, the glass snake is not even a snake. He is a legless lizard. A true snake has no eyelids. His staring eyes are covered with window panes of glassy skin. The so called glass snake has eyelids, just as a lizard has eyelids. A true snake has no ear openings. In fact he has no ears and is quite deaf. Lizards have small hearing holes in the sides of their heads and they can hear quite well. The so called glass snake has these lizard type ears.

Though he looks like a snake two to three feet long, the glass snake is a lizard who long ago lost his legs, Actually his body is about one foot long and the rest of him is tail. Being a true lizard, he has a very amazing tail. If he loses it, he can grow a new one. It is because of this wonderful gift that all the strange tales have grown up around him.

When a glass snake is grabbed by the tail, the tail comes off. And for a few minutes it continues to wriggle. This means that two thirds of his snaky body may break off and seem to remain alive. The front one third, which is actually his body, crawls safely away. Sometimes the tail breaks off into a second or third piece, each of them wriggling.

If you watch only this much of the show, you might think that those wriggly pieces fit themselves together again.

But if you keep the broken glass snake in captivity you can observe the rest of the story. The tail pieces wriggle only for a short while. But the front third of the amazing lizard stays very much alive. Soon it starts to sprout a new tail, In a few weeks, the glass snake is almost as good as new. Chances are, this fragile animal will lose his tail many times throughout his life. When grabbed by an enemy, this is a very clever trick. For while the hungry fox wrestles with the wriggly tail, the main part of the lizard crawls safely away.

The glass snake can re grow his tail any number of times. His original tail, however, had a backbone. Each new tail has only a band of gristle down the center.

 

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