Welcome to
our daily dose of Bitachon series. We're now in Shaar Habechina
and we're going to go into the world of reptiles as the Chovat Halevavot
gave us a directive to look into the things that crawl and slither. Let's look
to the signs of wisdom in general before we go into the specifics. The first
one is their thermal engineering.
Unlike birds
and mammals that must burn food constantly to stay warm, reptiles are
engineered as ectotherms. We'll see what that means in a minute. A reptile's
metabolism is designed to be switched off or slowed down to a fraction of a
mammal's rate and they use the sun as an external battery. This allows a large
reptile like a crocodile survive for months or even a year without a single
meal while a mammal spends ninety percent of its energy just maintaining its
body's temperature, the reptile is a masterpiece of energy conservation.
It only
spends its energy when it's absolutely necessary for the hunt. Parenthetically,
that's why they're known as cold-blooded versus hot-blooded. Mammals are
hot-blooded, we have to constantly heat up our bodies. That's one very
interesting thing about the reptiles.
The next one
is their ability to see. Many reptiles live close to the ground or hunt in the
dark and therefore they possess sensory tools that go beyond the five human
senses. They have what we call chemical sight. When a snake flicks its forked
tongue, it isn't tasting the air, it's collecting chemical molecules and
delivering them to an organ in the roof of its mouth.
The fork
shape allows the snake to smell in stereo. It can detect if a scent is stronger
on the left or the right, providing a chemical map of its surroundings. Other
snakes have thousands of heat-sensitive nerve endings on their faces. This
allows the snake to see the heat signatures of warm-blooded prey in total
darkness.
They can
detect temperature changes as small as .003 Celsius. So they basically have a
built-in night vision provided by Hashem himself. Now one of the things
we're supposed to look into is their special form and structure, the snake
which lacks legs as we Jewish people know as a punishment for the sin of the
original snake, yet God in his mercy is going to let them have a different
locomotion of moving without limbs. How does this work? A snake's spine can
have up to four hundred vertebrae to give a perspective, humans only have
thirty-three.
Each of
these vertebrae has a pair of ribs attached to powerful muscles. This allows
for rectilinear locomotion where the snake moves in a straight line by rippling
its belly scales like a conveyor belt.
It can climb, swim, and burrow all without a single limb. So whereas God on one
hand limited their ability to walk but God created a different path of function
which is this type of serpentine movement.
That's why
it has the term serpentine movement because it's the movement of a serpent.
That's our little introduction to the world of creeping, crawling reptiles and
creatures. Many of them lizards and we will get to more of it.
