Ground-Living Mamba, Tree-Living Cousins: teacher key

Black Mambas, grade 10 edition, written for 10th grade. The black mamba up close: where it lives, its size and colours, its names and family, its reported speed and movement, its senses, its day, its food, how its venom works and differs from its relatives, painkilling proteins found in it, its conservation status and how it breeds.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. What did the 2018 study say may explain the black mamba's different venom?
   • A different diet (answer)
   • A different colour
   • A different egg size
2. What do alpha-neurotoxins do in black mamba venom?
   • Turn the snake green
   • Block signals at the junction between nerves and muscles (answer)
   • Help eggs hatch
3. In the 2018 study, what mostly made up the green mambas' venoms?
   • Adenosine
   • Dendrotoxins I and K
   • Three-finger toxins (answer)
4. The bright green of the three green mambas once suggested what?
   • That they form a single group apart from the black mamba (answer)
   • That they are black mambas
   • That they live underground
5. Which acid-sensing channels explained the mambalgins' effect in pain-sensing neurons in mice?
   • Eye channels
   • ASIC1b channels (answer)
   • Ear channels
6. What does proteome mean in: the venom proteome of black mambas?
   • A snake's range
   • A kind of egg
   • The full set of proteins (answer)

Words

• undulation: wavy movement
• vomeronasal: smell organ
• Elapidae: snake family
• neurotoxic: harming nerves
• proteome: all proteins
• mambalgins: painkilling proteins