Frank T. Burbrink (Associate Curator, Division of Vertebrate Zoology, American Museum of Natural History):
There are no neutral reactions to seeing snakes, to being near them. I probably saw my first snake at 3, and whatever feeling that I had then seems to be the same feeling that I have now, even though I know a heck of a lot more about them.
Even as this animal that's basically just a head and a tube, the variation in that head and that tube, which sort of restricts you to the head-and-tube form, that variation in that, is massive. So you can have some that are adults that are about this big, and other ones that are adults that cross this entire room. Some that are adults that can only eat things like termites, and some that are adults that can eat deer. Ok? That's a pretty wide range of morphologies.
I try to figure out how speciation occurs so that is how do you go from making, having one species to making two species. Right? And so you know, the Earth may be composed of anywhere from 3-17 million or more species, right? How do those all come about?
To learn about these evolutionary processes - speciation, ecological change, and all these - you need a good group of organisms to study. You need an important group of organisms to study. Snakes, I think, provide a perfect model. They have lots of regional variation, lots of variation in ecology, in local areas, and so all of this stuff lives in the genome; now with snakes we're getting genomic-level information and we're solving major, major questions in evolutionary biology by having these genomic-scale information integrated with ecological information which we can generate, you know, much easier than we used to be able to.
What's interesting about it is teaching the next generation because a lot is required of the next generation. You have to know genomics, you have to know geology, you have to know ecology, you have to know mathematics, [laughing] you have to know computer programming, but it's a great adventure because it's all doable.
What always ends up happening, and what I love about doing science from the, from the stage of putting it together, assembling the team, assembling the data sets, is once you're done, you're never done. You don't want to deal with that question like dealt with it before, because what you now have is an answer that says, "Alright, I have now about 20 or 30 new questions."
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Snake researcher Frank T. Burbrink is an associate curator in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. His work examines the evolutionary history of reptiles and amphibians across the world, including in North America, South America, Asia, and Madagascar, to help understand how species are generated and how local communities are formed.