yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Desert Monster Tries to Survive in the American Southwest | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

The Gila monster is the most charismatic reptile we have in Arizona, for sure. We have seen temperatures increasing in the Tucson area. Gila monsters, you know, depend on humidity, and if humidity goes down lower earlier in the season, that could affect their activities. For Gila monsters, that might be a big deal because they tend to be actually not a very well physiologically adapted desert species in the sense that they lose water across their skin pretty easily.

The Gila monster has the distinction of being one of only two potentially dangerously venomous lizards in the world. This is a really cool lizard that people can really relate to. It's a symbol of the Southwest, and it's something that we care about deeply.

Gila monsters are pretty mysterious animals; you don't see them. They spend a lot of their time underground, but I think everybody remembers the first time they ever saw one. They're large, they're colorful, and they don't look like other lizards. The Gila monster is one of only two species in the beaded lizard family. They're called that because if you were to feel the top surface of a Gila monster, you would feel little bumps on it.

When you see it, it doesn't look really fleet and fast. It's not. The Gila monster actually has evolved to be a nest predator, so it doesn't have to be fast. If you see one and it doesn't see you, you can track them for a mile. What you do is let the animal just be, whenever it's not in its field of vision. Then you can gain ground and follow it.

If it gets even hotter and drier, you might at some point run out of appropriate habitat for healing. Fortunately, we do have areas that are set aside that are natural, you know, that are the protected home for Gila monsters, like our National Park. But, you know, those areas are those natural desert areas. There are fewer acres of that every year.

The Wyoming toad is found only in the Laramie Plains of Wyoming. It's found nowhere else in the world, and it has the maybe unfortunate distinction of being one of the most endangered amphibians in North America, and I think the most endangered amphibian in the United States.

More Articles

View All
Guided meditation visualizing thoughts as the surface of an ocean
Welcome and thanks for taking out the time for yourself for what will hopefully be a nice inward journey. So just start off sitting upright, feet planted on the ground, if you’re ideally on some type of a firm chair. And start to soften your gaze. If you…
Do Lemon Sharks Attack Each Other? | SharkFest
NARRATOR: The cannibal sharks investigation heads to Bimini in the Bahamas. The mangrove swamps here are a precious nursery for lemon sharks. Every year, scores of pregnant females return to these shallow waters where they were born to give birth. But in …
2015 AP Calculus BC 2a | AP Calculus BC solved exams | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy
At time ( T ) is greater than or equal to zero, a particle moving along a curve in the XY plane has position ( X(T) ) and ( Y(T) ). So, its x-coordinate is given by the parametric function ( X(T) ) and y-coordinate by the parametric function ( Y(T) ). Wi…
Finding the 100th term in a sequence | Sequences, series and induction | Precalculus | Khan Academy
[Instructor] We are asked what is the value of the 100th term in this sequence, and the first term is 15, then nine, then three, then negative three. So let’s write it like this in a table. So if we have the term, just so we have things straight, and t…
Pronoun number | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy
So here’s something weird and cool about English and languages in general: they have a sense of number kind of encoded into them. We call this grammatical number. The way this plays out is in the difference between singular and plural in English; the idea…
Unadopted amendments to the Bill of Rights | US government and civics | Khan Academy
Hi, this is Kim from Khan Academy. Did you know that what we call the First Amendment today was actually the Third Amendment in the original draft of the Bill of Rights? In fact, there were more than 200 proposed amendments, which were whittled down to ju…