A Mamba Family Tree: teacher key
Black Mambas, grade 11 edition, written for 11th grade. The black mamba up close: where it lives, its size and colours, its names, family and family tree, its reported speed and movement, its senses, its day, its food, how its venom and dendrotoxins work, painkilling proteins found in it, its conservation status and how it breeds.
Read the book. Print this page for the key.
Questions and answers
- When did a 2025 study date the start of the mamba family tree?
- About 6 million years ago (answer)
- About 60 years ago
- About 600 million years ago
- What did the 2025 study find inside the black mamba?
- Five hidden species
- No convincing signal of separate species (answer)
- A new green mamba
- What do researchers use dendrotoxins for?
- To measure speed
- To colour snake scales
- As probes to study how potassium channels work in nerves (answer)
- What do alpha-neurotoxins do in black mamba venom?
- Block signals at the junction between nerves and muscles (answer)
- Turn the snake green
- Help eggs hatch
- Dendrotoxins resemble protease inhibitors but have little anti-protease activity. What does this show?
- They are the same thing
- Looking alike does not mean working alike (answer)
- They are not proteins
- What does Elapidae name?
- A country
- A kind of egg
- A snake family (answer)
Words
- polylepis: many scales
- undulation: wavy movement
- vomeronasal: smell organ
- Elapidae: snake family
- neurotoxic: harming nerves
- mambalgins: painkilling proteins