BHB gives info on some scaleless concerns

[anatess]

thats basic physics and geometry, based on the fact that any kind of skin or flesh is intransparent to infrared, even otherwise transparent eyeballs are intransparent to it.

and ill let Richard Dawkins explain the geometry issue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEKyqIJkuDQ (of course the part where the lens comes in no longer applies to heat pits; the lens would be intransparent to infrared so the pit has to stay open.)

and a physics article about it:
http://phys.org/news76249412.html



you can find many more articles that mention the importance of the geometry of the pit and explaining that the snake figures out the direction by feeling which parts of the pit heat up and which dont. you can find it in physics, biology and herpetology articles.

I completely understand how pit organs work.

What I don't understand is how you run with the conclusion that just because the beta-keratin layer on a scaleless ball python is thin (it's not completely absent, hence it still sheds) it somehow loses its directional heat sensing capability.

Find this article in your college library:
Campbell, A. L., T. J. Bunning, M. O. Stone, D. Church, and M. S. Grace. 1999. Surface ultrastructure of pit organ, spectacle, and non pit organ epidermis of infrared imaging boid snakes: a scanning probe and scanning electron microscopy study. Journal of Structural Biology 126: 105-120.

It posits that boids don't just rely on the pit holes, they have micropits that are like pores that reconstruct infrared signals into an image. It supports the claim in the article you linked to that the 2 pit holes in pit vipers are more limited than say, a ball python that has several labial pits. If the beta keratin layer was so thin that a maximum array of signals hit the micropits, then you get better infrared vision. But that's just my opinion.

The bread of this butter can be evidenced by the ability of the scaleless ball python to find the head of the rat. Well, it would be great if Brian would actually give it a live one in the dark so we can see if it can track the rat and strike it on the back of the head. I'm betting that it can.