"California ground squirrels have learned to intimidate rattlesnakes by heating their tails and shaking them aggressively," reports the Associated Press.
"The tail "flagging" puts the snakes on the defensive, said Aaron Rundus, lead author of a study in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The snakes, which are ambush hunters, can sense infrared radiation from heat. So the warming makes the tails more conspicuous to them -- signaling that the squirrels may come and harass them, he said.
Adult squirrels are not the snakes' prey. The adults have a protein in their blood that allows them to survive the snake venom, and they have been known to attack snakes. Rather, the snakes are looking for young squirrels, which they can kill and eat, said Rundus.
Researchers are not sure how the squirrels heat up their tails, but they think it may be by shunting warm blood from the body core into the tail. But apparently it isn't just a reflex, because they do it only with rattlesnakes.
Rundus said that learning more about animal communication methods may help improve understanding of how human communications evolved.
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