By Janet Raloff
From San Francisco, at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting
Animals endure famine—some more successfully than others—by cannibalizing their own tissues. Rattlesnakes, among the champions, can survive more than 2 years between meals.
To understand how, evolutionary physiologist Marshall McCue of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville starved 2-year-old rattlers for more than 5 months and measured changes in their bodies. To his surprise, he found that although the snakes continued to move about and even to grow, “they undergo an almost hibernation-like drop in metabolic rate.” In this state, the snakes consumed just 20 percent as much oxygen as when they were well fed, says McCue.