ZOO LICIOUS!

I love the zoo! My dad, my mom, our friends, and I went to the zoo this past Monday. Although this time we went for fun and not learning I did find out something interesting. There are two different ways that organisms can look alike. The first way is mimicry. An example of mimicry is when two snakes in the same region look similar, usually one non-venomous and one venomous. The reason behind this evolution is so that pray will leave the non-venomous one alone as well as the venomous. For instance in our region, southern Louisiana, the scarlet king snake and the coral snake show the mimicry trait. The coral snake is the poisonous one. So since the scarlet king snake looks similar to the coral snake predators will stay away. Another way organisms are compared is through parallelism. Parallelism is when two species look and behave similar but are in different regions of the world. Here are some pictures we took at the zoo of two spcies of boas exhibiting the obervable fact of parallelism.

The emerald tree boa, Corallus caninus, is a green snake with white bands. It lives in trees and shrubs near water (like swamps and marshes in rain forests). It is found in the lower Amazon basin (in Brazil) and in Guyana and Suriname. The Green Tree Python is found in New Guinea, various islands in Indonesia, and the northern tip of Eastern Australia