What this means for the taipan in practical terms: in winter, when the outback mornings are cold and every minute of basking counts, a near-black body warms up faster. Darkening in cooler seasons increases heat gain during brief basking windows in arid environments. And in summer, when shade temperatures can push past 40\u00b0C and the sun is genuinely dangerous, a pale body slows down the heat absorption that would otherwise send the snake’s core temperature into a lethal spiral.<\/p>\n
The Australian Museum, one of the country’s most authoritative sources on native fauna, notes that the inland taipan is a medium to large snake with a robust build and a deep, rectangular-shaped head, and that the head and neck are several to many shades darker than the body, a gradient that makes sense when you consider that the head is usually angled toward the sun during basking while the body stays partially sheltered in a soil crack.<\/p>\n
And there’s one more layer. In captivity, the related coastal taipan changes colour with the seasons, becoming a bright coppery colour in summer and dull brown in winter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What this means for the taipan in practical terms: in winter, when the outback mornings are cold and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494795,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,212263,212264,212266,212267,212268,212265,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-494794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-inland-taipan","tag-inland-taipan-color","tag-inland-taipan-color-change","tag-inland-taipan-color-in-summer","tag-inland-taipan-color-in-winter","tag-inland-taipan-identify","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}