THE horned desert viper’s ability to hunt at night has always puzzled biologists. Though it lies with its head buried in the sand, it can strike with great precision as soon as prey appears. “Sometimes you even see the snake fly up and whirl round in the air to strike a mouse passing behind it,” says Bruce Young, a biologist at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas.
Now, Young and physicists Leo van Hemmen and Paul Friedel at the Technical University of Munich in Germany have developed a computer model of the snake’s auditory system to explain how the snake “hears”…
