@talesfromtreatment and I have an ask for our fellow corn snake keepers and breeders.
We're gathering information on corn snake size by age and we need community scientists like you to provide the largest possible body of data.
@talesfromtreatment will be using the information gathered to build an accurate, statistics-supported corn snake growth and feeding guide based on ACTUAL data from ACTUAL corn snake keepers like you! I'm just the numbers gal.
Here's what we need:
Your snake's age (in years)
Your snake's weight (in grams)
A top-down photo of your snake's entire body with an inch or centimeter reference. (see photo below)
All of this information entered in our online form, linked below or copy/pasta: https://forms.gle/QtAwmiFa6fpBewFs8
https://forms.gle/QtAwmiFa6fpBewFs8
We'd love to get data on older snakes, younger snakes, fatter snakes, skinnier snakes. If you've got a corn snake we want their age, weight, and a photo of them with a measuring device.
Photos don't need to be fancy, just give us a top-down view of your snake and a ruler/tape measure/yardstick on a flat surface.
The survey is anonymous and we won't share your photos with anyone nor use them for any purpose beyond collecting morphometric data for this specific study.
Please please please help us collect as much data as possible. Share with your reptile-keeping friends, signal boost, submit your metrics, and stay tuned for updates!
Mr. A. Lapthorn Smith, B.A., M.D. returns to tell us that an intellectual woman requires more "phosphates" to keep her brain working than an uneducated one. Unfortunately for her, being pregnant also requires phosphates and it's impossible to have enough for both. Either the child will be born with rickets or she will end up in an asylum. This is why college educated women have fewer children. Uh-huh.
AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE FIST MY BUMP AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE watched project hail Mary the other day and fell absolutely in love!; the frames, the story, everything was marvellous (ignoring the fact Dr. Grace did not calibrate the centrifuge) Lil drawing of Rocky and a very tired Dr. Grace. Loved the rol of science in the movie and loved the proper use of a micropipette.
Just a moment of nerding out to help fuel everyone's The Dragon Prince elf horn headcanons, here's the national park service's breakdown of horns vs antlers:
"Antlers—found on members of the deer family—grow as an extension of the animal’s skull. They are true bone, are a single structure, and, generally, are found only on males.
Horns—found on pronghorn, bighorn sheep, and bison—are a two-part structure. An interior portion of bone (an extension of the skull) is covered by an exterior sheath grown by specialized hair follicles (similar to human fingernails). Horns are usually found on both males and (in a diminutive form) females.
Antlers are shed and regrown yearly while horns are never shed and continue to grow throughout an animal’s life. One exception is the pronghorn, which sheds and regrows its horn sheath each year." (source)
Summarized!
Antlers are made of bone and shed every year
Horns are made of bone with an outer covering of keratin (the stuff fingernails, hooves, and hair is made of), and don't tend to shed.
The sexual dimorphism is different too, antlers are usually exclusively a male thing where horns may differ from male to female but usually both have them.
(caribou have antlers on both males and females, though in different seasons, and pronghorns shed parts of their horns every year though, so there's flexibility within the general rules!)
(deeper dive of science and how it connects to the show under the cut, but CW for blood and arguable gore, as the science of antlers is a bit graphic, but I wouldn't say it's worse than certain deaths that occurred in season 7.)
Because they are made of bone at the core, horns are likely to bleed when broken closer to the base, but de-horning/trimming the tips off of horns is commonly done in cattle to keep them from injuring themselves or each other with no adverse effects for the animal. Imagine a much larger version of trimming the claws of a cat or dog - the tips are fine to go, but get too close to the base and you're hitting live tissue and veins.
Antlers have a different growth cycle. When they first grow, they're covered in a thin skin and fur layer called velvet, which is absolutely riddled with blood vessels to bring nutrients to the antler. If the velvet is broken, it will bleed, and scraping the velvet off is often a very bloody affair. Shedding it is literally just . . . scraping off a layer of skin and letting the antler wear and harden, it looks brutal, but the deer don't seem to be particularly distressed about it. If the antler is broken while it's still in velvet, it will bleed. If it's finished growing, though, an antler will calcify and harden, meaning there won't be blood in the antler itself once the velvet is removed (unlike horns). That's why the stumps don't bleed when they're shed later in the year. (source)
On that note, neither antlers nor horns have nerves the way the rest of the body does.
Antlers only have nerves in the velvet, and those are shed with the skin when the antlers are done growing. Again, despite the velvet being actual skin with nerves in it, they don't seem to mind it! I'm no professional, but I would hazard a guess that since there's no further need for extra blood to the area to grow the horn, reduced blood flow results in reduced sensation as they go to shed the velvet.
Horns don't have nerves in the tip, which is how dehorning can be done safely with cattle. When the horns first start to grow, the nerve and bloodless tip will be most of it, and it can be removed without harm to the animal, and if that trim is maintained, it will never grow longer horns. However, once a longer horn is grown, there are nerves in the thicker base just as there is blood.
Now because the Tidebound exist though, I'm going to delve into coral and shells for a second too, though mind, I don't know any of this shit nearly as well as I know horns (lived around cattle and deer) so this is what I could glean from some basic research and is by no means definitive
Coral don't have nervous systems the way we would think of them at all, with only the most basic of nerve nets throughout their bodies allowing them to react, and only minorly, to stimuli. Many scientists believe this means they don't feel pain as we would perceive it, but rather just register touch and cannot differentiate sensation. Others suggest that since they react by withdrawing from harm, this qualifies as some version of reacting to pain. However, since coral have no brains or backbones or advanced nervous systems, it's all rather theoretical. (source) So, my personal take would be that Finnegrin can probably feel things touching his "horns" regardless of where it is (where Terry probably can't at all, if he's not in velvet, and Rayla wouldn't be able to feel the tips of hers), but he wouldn't necessarily be able to differentiate what the touch is, just that it's there.
Shells are a whole different beast. The shells of vertebrates like turtles are way different than the shells of mollusks and gastropods, but the latter are the ones we see in Tidebound elves. Those are super unique in this conversation because not only do they not have nerves, those shells aren't living tissue at all. They don't even have proper cells. Those shells are constructed of very basic proteins and minerals that are hardened over time into the shell around the creature that lives inside. The shell can't be felt at all, though if the creature inside has enough of a nervous system to feel sensations, they will likely feel the shell move around them if there's contact with it. (source)
So, from what we know about elves!
If Moonshadow elves have true horns, Runaan should have been bleeding heavily for a few minutes from how low that horn was broken (though likely not enough to do him serious harm from blood loss, he'd just feel a bit iron deficient for a few days. Horns tend to clot quickly when broken). We can assume they did not do this because of the kids' rating of season 1, even if the writers knew horns should bleed. He also likely felt a significant amount of pain, and probably has a nasty headache and possibly a concussion from having his head rattled that hard.
In contrast, even if his horn was carved to fit the caps he wears, Ethari probably wouldn't have really felt it (other than vibrations in his skull). However, horns can be trained to grow in certain configurations over time, and the caps might have been a training tool to ensure they grew into the desired curve, and then just left on as decoration or armor. Moonshadow elves seem fond of dual-purpose everything, so a metal cap that's training tool, decoration, and armor all at once is right up their alley.
(on the note of Moonshadow elves, also, it seems likely that the "wood grain" we see on their horns is also willful decoration, as the Moonshadow children we witness don't have that grain, and the interior of Runaan's broken horn lacks any evidence of it. As we can see in this shot with Ruthari, the patterns also aren't of the same style from elf to elf, but the grain on Runaan's horns is mostly lines like his tattoos, and Ethari's horns and tattoos both feature delicate swirls.)
Sunfire elves definitely have horns, though they are intriguing as it seems there's not a very strong delineation between skin and horn. However, that could also just be art style, as there's plenty of horned animals that have fur or skin roughly the same color as the base of the horn around the base of it. This includes some pronghorns, which you'll remember are the neat antelope that sheds the keratin layer on their horns and regrows it but keeps the bony core, and antelope. We've pretty much covered how their horns would work with the Moonshadow elves, as they're pretty similar, though Sunfire elves' horns are smaller and their vulnerable zones would be as well, though they're also thinner and likely more vulnerable to breakage (hence, I imagine, all the armoring on them).
Skywing elves are an interesting conundrum though, because unlike Moonshadow and Sunfire elves, they have a quite varied set of horn styles. Astrid seems to have a fairly basic goat horn curve (as does Kosmo).
Nyx's horns curve so sharply that from many angles she appears to have two sets, but in her concept art we can see that she just has a secondary branch at the very base of her horns, which is reflected in Hendyr (the Skywing Dragonguard) as well. And all of these people are among the 20% of Skywing who have wings, so it's not genetically linked to that trait. The lobed pattern of Nyx and Hendyr's horns appears to be more standard, with most unnamed Skywing also having horns that are layered to look like feathers. The Elder is like this as well.
Suroh, the little Skywing boy Rayla meets in Bloodmoon Huntress, however, has goat horns like Astrid - except placed lower on his head, and having ridges that hers do not.
So far though, all of the Skywing seem to have some common traits: their horns are relatively short, and curl close to their heads, having ridges or lobes that mimic feathers. All of them resemble various types of goats, all are definitely horns.
I dunno what the fuck was wrong with this guy, why does he have dragon horns when none of the others do, what makes him special?
Everything. Everything makes Ibis special. I miss him so much.
*coughs* anyway, Skywing elves likely have a fairly strong culture of training their horns to grow in specific directions, based on the variance in how they curl. Also, if Astrid's horns continued to curl in that direction they would absolutely eventually stab her if they hadn't stopped growing or been trained to grow that far from her head. Imagine if she had the tight curl we see with Suroh but with her horn placement.
Now we get to the Earthblood, where things get more interesting.
Those are definitely goat horns, and not even decorative mimicry like Astrid's, just straight up bighorn ram. Simple. Case closed, right?
Nah.
Because this little kid is an Earthblood from the same community, who clearly seems to have branching going on in his head ornamentation already, which is generally a trait of antlers. (Though, there's those pronghorns again.) Unfortunately, we don't really see enough to confirm whether they're antlers or horns, but let's just assume antlers for the fun lore of it all. Earthblood elves start growing them at a much younger life stage than most antlered animals. It also makes sense why Earthblood elves seem to keep shorter hair than many other elves - the antlered ones have fucking velvet to worry about. Can you imagine getting dead, bloody skin out of your hair??
What's interesting is that Terry's horns do not have the branching I would expect from antlers. As a matter of fact, his horns are virtually indistinguishable from a Moonshadow elf's, though he doesn't have the purple wood grain effect we're used to seeing with them (again, my guess is that that's painted on anyway). So based on Terry alone, I would actually say he also just has horns, and N'than and Earthblood Callum (and the elves that indulge Earthblood Callum as a trope) being the only indication they sometimes have antlers.
oh but then, then we get into some Really Interesting stuff with Mukho. Look at that. Do those look like antlers? They do seem to have branching, but they also have what appears to be flat plates. I would actually hazard a guess that Mukho is one of the Earthblood we heard about back in the day, with horns of crystal or stone rather than antlers or goat horns. That one, I don't really know how to make work biologically, which is why I didn't give a rundown for it up top. This one's just magic.
The Tidebound also have some interesting shit going on, though. Finnegrin here has coral on his head, and if you remember, coral has basic nerves throughout its body but scientists debate whether it can feel pain as we understand it. My guess would be that Finnegrin and other Tidebound like him can register touch to their horns in a way that Rayla wouldn't be able to feel at the tips of hers, and an antlered Earthblood wouldn't feel unless in velvet, but he wouldn't necessarily feel pain at one of them being broken. He'd just be aware of it.
Akiyu would feel her "horns" even less, with shells being made of basic proteins and minerals and not, strictly speaking, having nerves or live tissue at all.
So! Elves have wildly varying cranial ornamentation and there's some Science about it!
Also, to veer into conjecture a bit, it's worth noting that while Moonshadow and Sunfire horns are constructed similarly, they're likely for very different evolutionary purposes. Moonshadow horns are larger, yes, but are heavily angled towards their back, indicating use either ramming with the length or base (as we see with goat horns) or defense against attacks from behind. Sunfire elf horns are smaller but often angled much more upright, indicating more ability to use them as stabbing weapons.
