Monitor Lizards in Australia Dig Corkscrew Nests | Hacker News Reader

Monitor Lizards in Australia Dig Corkscrew Nests

theatlantic.com

40 pointsJonathanBuchh12 comments

Are monitor lizards chiral? Or do they dig enantiomeric nests?

A corkscrew is chiral, if that's what you're asking.

right, so do they prefer one orientation over the other? Are these (E)-lizards or (Z)-lizards or a racemic mixture of the two? The world must know!

See Scientific American blog post [1] which has a drawing from the paper author.

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/goanna...

> The V. panoptes burrows start with a short sub-horizontal section, then have a long curving, descending section, at the end of which is a descending vertical helix that can have as many as eight convolutions. Some of the helices are clockwise, others are anti-clockwise, and some switch from one direction to the other (Doody et al. 2015).

ok, that’s what i wanted to know. Monitor lizards are racemic.

"She lays her eggs and digs her way back out, emerging seven to 10 days after she first submerged."

Wow.

And the corkscrew is counter-clockwise because of the Coriolis effect.

Probably not worth bringing them to the northern hemisphere to test this theory.

  > Australia’s brutal dry season, when several months might go by without any rain.

But that's just a typical Bay Area summer!

Seriously, there are many parts of the world where this is true. Bad reporting, maybe?

Non turbare pixelos meos.

"people called Romanes, they go the 'ouse"?

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