Snakes are the most unusual creatures on the planet. Even with the complete absence of limbs, they are able to inspire fear in any person, because the main weapon of reptiles is poison. Of course, not all varieties of snakes are poisonous, but at first glance it is almost impossible to distinguish them, especially for an inexperienced person. According to statistics, more than half of all the inhabitants of the planet are wary of these animals, and only 1/5 of them boldly declare that they are not afraid of any snakes.
For many years, humanity has attributed unusual abilities to these reptiles, describing in their legends and tales snake-like talking creatures that can hit a person with one glance. All this has led to the fact that today only real people love snakes. connoisseurs cold-blooded, but even they are wary of sharp teeth and stranglehold.
Description
To distinguish a snake from other animals is quite simple. Only these reptiles do not have legs at all, but this is clearly visible only with close contact. It is almost impossible to see a snake in its natural environment. All of them are skilled camouflage, able to lie for hours without moving, waiting for prey. Many may mistake a snake for an ordinary lizard, because from afar they even have a similar manner. movement.
Interestingly, snakes need teeth exclusively for spraying poison into the prey, its strong grip and further pushing into the esophagus. These reptiles do not chew their prey at all, swallowing it whole, therefore the teeth of snakes are very sharp, thin and bent back.
Snakes can hunt at different times of the day, in which Jacobson's sense organ helps them a lot. Thanks to him, cold-blooded unmistakably determine location victims. Their tongue is constantly in motion, as if feeling the area around and transmitting information to the sky, where the characteristic pits are located - Jacobson's organ, which performs further chemical analysis.
These reptiles have no hearing at all, and their eyesight is very weak, but at the same time they were able to live on Earth for many years unchanged. How? Some common species have an additional thermolocation organ capable of capturing the heat of a prey at a great distance. This allows predators to hunt without eye contact.
In captivity, legless reptiles are considered centenarians, since all the necessary conditions are artificially created for them. On average, snakes live in the wild for about 40 years, but it all depends on their species. Many live to an older age. According to various legends, anacondas over 100 years old live in the rivers of the Amazon, but so far this information has not been confirmed.
Reptiles can live in captivity both in spacious terrariums of zoos and at home. If you properly care for a room snake, then it can live for several decades, but how much is measured out to its owner depends only on his behavior. Absolutely all representatives of the species are predators by nature, and it is impossible to tame them. They are all very dangerous and, if handled incorrectly, can bite their own owner at any time with a lightning-fast reaction.
First snake
If a person has a desire to have such a slippery killer in his own home, then experienced reptile connoisseurs advise choosing a maize snake. This snake is not whimsical to care for and is ideal for the role of the first cold-blooded pet.
It is important to understand that you will have to feed the reptile with living creatures. For a complete diet, meat, sausages and other food from the table are not suitable. Depending on species and preferences, snakes eat:
Terrarium for a snake
Features of the place of residence of a reptile depend on its type, but there are general rules. The terrarium itself can be made of plastic or glass, the main thing is that it has ventilation, but does not give the animal the opportunity to arbitrarily leave the allocated area. The dimensions of the snake dwelling depend on the animal itself. In a too spacious terrarium, the reptile will feel uncomfortable, because in nature they spend most of their lives in ambush.
The general rule for a snake to live is the presence of a temperature gradient in the terrarium so that the animal can independently choose a comfortable environment for itself at a certain moment. It is also important to have a pool in which everything cold-blooded can completely fit. In the terrarium, you need to build a shelter, provide heating and pick up the soil.
In order for the snake to live as many years as possible with its owner, experienced people advise growing food on their own. This will prevent possible diseases of the reptile due to contaminated food.
Important Rules
Since snakes are not lap dogs and cats, when they are kept strictly forbidden:
If, by negligence, the snake nevertheless bit a person, you cannot force it off the bitten part of the body, this will only provoke it to further aggression. A person will have to wait until the reptile itself opens its mouth and releases “its prey”.
If you don’t kill the mermaid, then, at worst, at least catch her. Sometimes it worked.
At one time, Catholic missionaries had a professional interest in mermaids. It was important to establish whether they were people or fish. If they are people and they have a soul, the word of God should have been brought to them. But first you need to catch at least one. It is no coincidence that one can often read about such attempts in the memoirs of missionaries.
A missionary from the Capuchin order said that on the way to the Congo they saw from the deck how the "inhabitants of the sea", mermaids, along with newts, collected algae on a shallow bottom. The ship anchored, and the nets were unnoticed, but the mermaids, noticing human deceit, deftly avoided them. "None got caught!" said the Capuchin with understandable annoyance.
Another missionary, an Italian, Father Francis from Pavia, who visited Angola in 1701, did not believe at first when the locals told him that mermaids lived in their lake. Then, in order to prove it to him, they caught one in the net and presented it to him. The missionary examined her in detail and described her in his notes, adding that a day after she was caught, she, unfortunately, died.
It was important in Angola to clarify whether mermaids have a soul because the natives did not just catch mermaids, but often ate them. Who did they eat, in the end, fish or people?
The church has never been closer to answering this question than in 1560, when off the coast of Mandar Island, near Ceylon, a Dutch ship caught seven mermaids at once. The Jesuit fathers, who found themselves in those parts, naturally tried not to miss the opportunity and find out if they were people and if they had a soul. But the researchers drowned in discussions and could not come to any conclusion.
M. Bosquet, the personal physician of the Dutch Viceroy in Goa, came to a more definite conclusion. Having applied to the case both his professional knowledge of anatomy and a scalpel, in his conclusion he argued that the mermaids caught off Mandar Island are not only externally, but also internally similar in all people. Obviously, he did not cut on the living. Because all the mermaids who were immediately placed in large tanks of water died after a few days.
The fate of others turned out to be just as short, as soon as they fell into captivity. Triton, or "sea man", was caught in 1682 near the seaside Italian town of Sestri, not far from Genoa. At the same time, many townspeople had the opportunity to examine it closely. “During the day,” a contemporary wrote, “he was seated on a chair, which convincingly indicates that his body is quite flexible and has joints, which fish do not have. He lived only a few days, crying and uttering plaintive cries, and all this time he did not eat or drink anything.
Whether the despair of captivity was the reason for this, or the food that they were offered and which they could not accept, only all the inhabitants of the sea that they managed to catch could not live with people.
In January 1738, the London Daily Post reported to its readers that a mermaid had been caught in the bay near Topsham, Devon. It was then shown to the public in the cities of Exter, Bristol and Bath. It is not known how long she lived in captivity and what happened to her afterwards.
Although, according to the testimonies of those years, mermaids were not so rare in the seas, for people they still remained outlandish creatures. That is why, when a mermaid was caught in a net in the Baltic Sea in 1531, they immediately hurried to send it as a gift to the Polish king Sigismund II. The king and the whole court had the opportunity to see her with their own eyes. Unfortunately, not for long either. On the third day the prisoner died.
I found only two reports of mermaids that managed to survive for a while in captivity.
In 1430, in Holland, a storm washed out a dam, and many lands were flooded by the sea. Residents had to travel by boat. One morning, girls from the town of Edam were sailing in a boat to milk the cows. In shallow water, in liquid mud, they noticed a mermaid stuck there. They took her with them and she began to live with them. The mermaid lived with them for fifteen years. In fact, she couldn't speak. But they taught her to wear a dress, knit and eat with them. In addition, like good Catholics, they taught her to worship the cross. The latter, the chronicle says, gave occasion, when she died, to bury her in a Christian way.
About another mermaid, who also lived in captivity, not only a record has been preserved, but even her portrait, which was executed by the “famous Sue Gauthier” from nature in 1758 in Paris. Here it was exhibited for public viewing in a large aquarium at the fair in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. They fed her, wrote a contemporary, with bread and fish. She was “very mobile and with pleasure deftly splashed in a vat of water, where they kept her. She rests in an upright position. Her appearance is ugly and vile.” Looking at the drawing that has come down to us, it is difficult to disagree with this.
In general, the descriptions of these creatures basically coincide with each other. Even when witnesses are separated by thousands of kilometers or centuries. Discrepancies, however, when there are, obviously, say that these creatures outwardly differ from each other. A beautiful mermaid from children's fairy tales is, as it were, one pole. The other is a creature depicted by Sue Gaultier. Or described in one of the medieval Icelandic texts. Here is what it says about the mermaid who was caught near the island of Grimsey: “This monster had a completely repulsive face - wide eyebrows, a piercing gaze, a huge mouth and a double chin.”
However, not only mermaids sometimes appear from the depths of the sea. Sometimes this creature, also with a fish tail, turns out to be masculine. One English chronicle mentions such a "sea man" who was caught and dragged ashore in 1187 on the coast of Suffolk. It is not known how much he had to spend in captivity, but either he was not particularly guarded, or he turned out to be ungrateful to his masters, but only somehow he managed to get rid of captivity. “He threw himself into the sea,” concludes the writer, “and no one saw him again.”
True, it happened that the catchers themselves released those caught.
In 1619, two advisers to the Danish king Christian IV, sailing from Norway to Sweden, noticed a humanoid creature on board, sailing along the same course. Kind people tossed him a big chunk of bacon just to please him. The simple-minded creature, inexperienced in human cunning, could not, of course, assume that a hook on a strong twine was hidden in the bacon. Caught on this bait, the sea merman was dragged onto the deck. But he shouted so loudly, there was something so threatening in his cry, that the timid sailors considered it good to throw him back into the sea.
Sometimes those caught were released back by the fishermen. Somehow this happened off one of the Shetland Islands. As reported by a magazine published in Edinburgh, the fishermen, taking out the net, pulled out the mermaid with it. It was grayish in color and without scales on the tail. After keeping her in the boat for some time, they decided that, out of harm's way, it was better to get rid of her. And thrown overboard. Live, please. It was believed that if some misfortune happened at sea later, everyone would say, they say, because of you. There was no need to torture the sea creature.
The six fishermen near Yell Island, who in the same places in 1833 also caught a mermaid, probably reasoned in the same way. They did it unwittingly, she got tangled in the net that they took out. She was three feet tall, they said. There were no gills on her body, and there were no scales on her tail. According to their story, she did not resist and did not even try to bite, but only moaned plaintively. After keeping the captive in the boat for three hours, they also released her back into the sea. According to them, she immediately dived and went into the depths.
Sometimes it was possible to catch mermaids in Russia. These were "river", or "meadow", mermaids, as you can understand, without a tail. Here is an entry made according to the words of the peasants in 1891: “It was a long time ago, the old people told me, two people were brought to our village. They are feminine and have long hair. And they didn’t say anything, they just cried, and when they let them go, then they sang, played - and into the forest.
And another story about such a capture, which V. I. Dal wrote down at one time. “There is a village in the Petrovsky government; the peasants call it the Monastery; It was built on the shore of a lake, which has a circumference of two versts. They say that a long time ago, the peasants of this village, catching fish, dragged a child out of the lake with nets; the child frolicked, played when they lowered him into the water, and cried, languished if they carried him into the hut. A fisherman who caught a child once said to him:
“Listen, boy, I won’t torment you anymore, I’ll let you go to your father in the lake, just serve me too: in the evening I will set up the nets, catch up, my friend, there are more fish in them.
The child sitting on the pole trembled, and his eyes sparkled. The man set up strong nets on the lake, put the child in a tub and, carrying it to the shore, threw it into the water.
In the morning a peasant comes to inspect the net: it is full of fish! The peasant enriched himself by fishing.
Of course, they did not always and not at all times do this to them - they let them go free. “Caught fish, caught a mermaid. Caught girl. The braid is long. Toko doesn't speak. And they put her in school. At first they didn't go to school. Put in school, and we went to look. And then she was sent ... where to go. That's what a mermaid was caught! (Recorded in 1982, Khvoynoye village, Novgorod region.)
Probably, this mermaid, like others, having fallen into captivity, did not live long. In the same place where they were sent (“where to follow”), the ends, of course, cannot be found.
Many are interested in how many finches live. Their lifespan depends on the environment. In nature, these birds overcome many difficulties, dangers await them day and night. In captivity, the lifespan of finches is directly related to the care and attention of the owner. Let's see how long they can live in various conditions.
What can affect the life span of amadins in nature
How many years a wild finch will live depends on access to food. forced to feed on what grows within reach. Sudden and prolonged drought can reduce the number of finches, as it dries out plants and leaves birds without food.
Nomadic species cope with this problem more easily, because they can afford to move to fertile lands at any time. However, not all individuals withstand long flights, dying on the way.
Along with the search for food, birds have to constantly look for drink. Except for the zebra finches. They can live for long periods without water and are even capable of drinking salt water, which is deadly to most birds.
In dry times, this also becomes a problem, which significantly reduces the number of flocks. The number of birds is also affected by poisoned reservoirs - in this way, farmers try to get rid of annoying finches looking for food in the farmer's fields. There are also traps in which the bird can meet death.
How many years the finches will live also depends on whether it becomes the prey of a predator. Among the birds of prey that pose a danger to finches, the following can be distinguished:
- hawks;
- sparrowhawks;
- ravens;
- drongo;
- eagles;
- owls;
- starlings;
- falcons.
Some predators can destroy clutches and eat young birds. For example, snakes, lizards, ants, flies, cuckoos, widows, cow corpses.
As a result, in the wild, finches live for about two to five years. Some of their species are under threat of extinction. For example, black-faced and royal parrot varieties.
Gouldian finches are also dying out as a species. This was influenced not only by the dangers and difficulties that birds face daily, but also by their behavior. Gouldian finches are very poor parents who often leave their eggs or chicks to their deaths.
Life in captivity
The duration of their life depends on how the finches live at home. Only properly organized maintenance and proper care will protect exotic pets from tragic consequences.
With a caring owner who has managed to recreate habitat conditions close to natural, finches will be able to live many happy years. There are cases when representatives of some species lived up to fifteen years.
You can get acquainted with the life expectancy of some species of these birds in the following table:
What affects the life expectancy of finches in captivity
Inhumane breeding and place of purchase
The life span of finches is influenced by genetic predisposition. Multiple attempts by amateur breeders to breed new mutational species of these birds have led to the fact that some individuals began to appear. Sometimes chicks die immediately after birth or while still in the egg.
Buying a bird in a pet store or in a bird market does not give a 100% guarantee that it will be healthy and young. Even the good ones will not save the finch if she is already seriously ill. And an adult bird will not live long with you.
But even a young and outwardly healthy bird can die, despite the best efforts of the owner. For example, due to a hereditary disease, the signs of which were not noticed in a timely manner.
Poor living conditions and care
Owners who do not have experience in keeping finches can cage birds of other species with them. Such neighborhood often turns into a constant struggle for territory and food. In "combat" conditions, finches can become depressed, which will exhaust them and destroy them. Injuries incompatible with life are not excluded.
Inexperienced owners will reduce the age of their pets if they are poorly maintained or cared for. Amadins are very clean birds. In unsanitary conditions, they will not last long.
The mental and physical state of birds is also affected by the size and location of the cage, low temperatures, dry air, toxic odors and fumes, lack of water procedures and sunbathing, sleep-wake disturbances, and dim lighting.
If the finches are released for free walks around the room, then non-compliance with safety conditions can take their lives. Birds can fly out of an open window, get into a fan, drown in containers with liquids, get poisoned by toxic substances or houseplants, or die from electric shock.
If a bird falls into the paws of a cat or into the mouth of a dog, then it runs the risk of being eaten. Even if the animals decide to just play with the bird, they can infect the finches through their saliva, which contains bacteria that are deadly for birds.
The lifespan of Amadins directly depends on them. Improper balance of nutrients, vitamins and minerals, poor quality or expired feed, sour or missing food, dirty water - all this can undermine the health of birds and lead to their death.
stressful situations and trauma
A sudden change of scenery can adversely affect the mental state of the finches. Experiencing strong feelings, the bird often refuses to eat and drink. Starvation and dehydration lead to the fact that even a healthy individual loses strength and dies. That is why the birds should not be disturbed at first, to give them the opportunity to get used to the new environment.
Small finches can be frightened by sudden actions of pets. For example, the loud barking of a dog or a curious cat sticking its paws into a cage. Also, birds can be scared by children trying to get them out of the cage. Loud noises from the TV, vacuum cleaner, music center are capable of introducing the finches into a state of shock. Any stress can bring the bird to death.
Sometimes birds die from injuries sustained while flying. They can be injured while walking around the room or in small cages. Also, small birds can be crushed by the door, they can be stepped on or sat down.
Conclusion
To try to avoid the death of finches, it is necessary to surround the birds with care and attention, organize proper living conditions, monitor their activity and appetite, and regularly examine them. If in doubt, take your pet to the veterinarian.
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