Yellow-bellied sea snake
Hydrophis platurus
— Where the name comes from
Hydrophis is “water snake”, from hýdōr and óphis; platurus, “flat tail”, describes the essential adaptation — a tail compressed sideways into a fin. It is the only sea snake that lives in the open ocean, and its range runs from East Africa to the American coast: it is the most widely distributed snake on the planet.
— Facts
- Group
- Reptiles · Reptilia
- Order
- Squamates
- Habitat
- The surface of the open ocean, along convergence lines between currents
- Range
- The Indian and Pacific Oceans, from the Persian Gulf to Chile
- Size
- 70–90 cm, 200–400 g
- Diet
- Small fish that gather beneath floating debris
- Lifespan
- 10 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It never touches land: it bears live young at sea.
- 02
Washed ashore it cannot get back into the water and dies.
- 03
It gathers in thousands along the foam lines where debris collects.
— What sets it apart
It lives in salt water and it is thirsty. For years it was assumed it drank the sea and voided the salt through special glands; recent measurements showed instead that it does not drink salt water at all and dehydrates slowly for months, until it rains: when a tropical downpour strikes the ocean a lens of fresh water floats for some hours over the salt, and in that window these snakes come up to drink. In prolonged dry seasons part of the population simply dies of thirst, in the middle of the water.
