Ben Tapley
speaker
11 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 29 May
Ben Tapley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, this is a male king cobra.
His name's Arthur and they are the largest venomous snake on the planet.
They're constantly kind of just scanning the environment, seeing what cues they can pick up on.
And that's part of the tongue-flicking, is they're kind of looking for sense in the environment.
So the split in the tongue is basically when they flick the tongue out, they're looking for chemical cues in the environment.
And by having the split, they can send things differently from either side.
So they're kind of sensing in stereo.
So what they do is once that tongue goes back into its mouth, they've got an organ on the roof of the mouth called a Jacobson's organ, and that interprets what the two forks are picking up on.
So it's more smelling the air rather than tasting.
I mean, each species will have different kind of constraints along their kind of evolutionary path.
And this is the way that snakes have cracked sensing their environment.
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