Curious places in Seychelles
3 articles, each fact-checked and tied to a spot you can stand on.
There are 150,000 giant tortoises - the world's largest population of reptiles living in one place.
Caecilians, obscure legless amphibians, convergently evolved resistance to elapid snake neurotoxins at least 15 separate times across the globe, using three completely different molecular mechanisms. But the Seychelles caecilians, isolated from elapid snakes for 65 million years, show zero resistance mutations, a perfect natural control experiment. Our own lineage carries partial cobra-venom resistance that may have inadvertently driven some cobras to evolve the ability to spit venom at us.
100,000 tortoises whose DNA reveals they survived the 1902 eruption of a nearby volcano. Just barely; with genetic bottleneck scars still visible.
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