Snakes become transvestites to get warm

Australian zoologist and professor of Sidney University Rick Shine made a sensational discovery: many kinds of snakes are capable of becoming transvestites and of successfully posing as females by spreading female pheromones. However, this is not a caprice but a way to get warm: after winter hibernation, snakes become sluggish, so their bodies’ temperature abruptly decreases. There is the only way to avoid becoming a prey: to pretend to be a female. The “female” will at once surrounded by a tangle of males who immediately warm their “girlfriend." Luckily, snakes are peaceful animals: when the males get to know they have been swindled, they simply creep to look for real “ladies” secreting real pheromones. As for the rest, snakes are like human beings: Shine states that almost every young snake passes through this stage it its development, though such “fun” is not the adult snakes’ way.