Behavior
The short-tailed snake is as poorly understood as it is seldom-seen, rare and geographically limited. It is a burrowing snake that rarely appears above ground and does so even more rarely during the day. Like other snakes of the tribe Lampropeltini, it vibrates its tail when startled by predators or people but can be distinguished from a rattlesnake by its slender build and lack of rattle. An excitable snake, it makes a poor captive and is protected against harassment or captivity by Florida law. Despite this, much of what little we know about the short-tailed snake has been based on observations of captive specimens.
Read more about this topic: Short-tailed Snake
Famous quotes containing the word behavior:
“To be told that our child’s behavior is “normal” offers little solace when our feelings are badly hurt, or when we worry that his actions are harmful at the moment or may be injurious to his future. It does not help me as a parent nor lessen my worries when my child drives carelessly, even dangerously, if I am told that this is “normal” behavior for children of his age. I’d much prefer him to deviate from the norm and be a cautious driver!”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“... two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounding utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of cases.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The psychological umbilical cord is more difficult to cut than the real one. We experience our children as extensions of ourselves, and we feel as though their behavior is an expression of something within us...instead of an expression of something in them. We see in our children our own reflection, and when we don’t like what we see, we feel angry at the reflection.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)