A thick, honey-like adhesive at
the tip of a chameleon’s tongue lets it bring its prey to its mouth after
snagging it, scientists discover.
By Carrie Arnold
PUBLISHED JUNE 20, 2016
Chameleons have a sticky problem.
To catch their insect dinner,
their tongues unfurl forward faster than a jet plane. It’s a precise attack,
and it’s remarkably successful. But snagging prey with their tongue is only the
first step. In order to eat, they have to bring the prey back to their mouth.
There lies the problem, says
physicist Pascal
Damman of the University of Mons in Belgium. Chameleons don’t wrap
their tongues around their prey, which means that the food they catch must
somehow stick to their tongue.
In a new paper in Nature Physics, Damman and
colleagues show that chameleons produce a viscous, sticky mucus on the tip of
their tongue that’s 400 times thicker than human saliva. Tiny amounts of this
syrupy goo with the thickness of honey is what lets these animals catch prey
that can weigh up to one-third their body weight.
“It’s a very simple mechanism,
and it shows things don’t have to be very complex to be very effective,” he
said.
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