Life Sciences Commons^™

Spatial Learning Of Shelter Locations And Associative Learning Of A Foraging Task In The Cottonmouth, (Agkistrodon Piscivorus), Rhyan Robert Friesen

MSU Graduate Theses

Learning processes can have significant adaptive value in mediating behaviors with important fitness consequences. For snakes, learning may ensure the localization of key resources including food and shelter. Snakes are proportionately underrepresented in reptile learning studies, and the majority of research subjects are within the family Colubridae. I presented captive cottonmouth snakes with two types of learning challenges. In a spatial learning experiment, snakes learned the location of a cover object in a circular laboratory arena, as demonstrated by a 56% reduction of time and 57% reduction of distance travelled to a shelter across a series of training trials. In …