HOW do chameleons manage to grab big creatures like birds using just their tongues? A Belgian scientist has come up with the answer: chameleons suck.
Many reptiles use their tongues to capture prey, and most rely on their tongue's rough surface and sticky coating of mucus to get a good grip on a target. But this only works for small prey such as insects.
Chameleons are known to feed on larger animals such as lizards and birds. But to catch animals of this size, they would need an unfeasibly big tongue with a huge surface. "It's going to be so big, it's going to be bigger than their head," says Anthony Herrel at the University of Antwerp. "It made us think there's something weird going on here."
To find out the chameleon's secret, Herrel collaborated with researchers at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff to film them feeding. Head-on shots taken ...
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