It is enchanting but also repulsive.
It makes me feel naked; vulnerable as if I am and everyone I know is an evolutionary mistake. I am in no way equipped to defend myself against it––my hands, fingers and jointed arms all clumsy and convoluted with impoverished functions. My soft and mostly hairless outer layer of skin provides no protection against an attack. The purity of its confidence is an acid tossed upon my own. While at once enchanted but also repulsed, I see its body as the most pristine of all mirrors; inverting the surrounding desert into a cosmic signature of terrestrial excellence.
Though it does not speak its voice surrounds me. I see the source of sound, and yet, observe only a disparity in how the source cannot fully account for the effect it has upon me. The speed of the rattlesnake’s rattle is well beyond the refresh rate of the eye ––peeking at around 90 fluctuations per second. Though I am just a few feet away, three feet away, microphones in hand, I don’t actually see the rattle moving. What I see is a mist surrounding the end of its tail. A smudge of a color with the hue of ancient fingernails, made by movements too fast for my brain to process.
I am intoxicated by this disparity: between knowing that the sound is simply the result of an evolutionary novelty, whereby self-similar keratinous segments form in such a way as to remain connected yet anatomically separated from one another; and its affect, which despite physical simplicity reaches into me, makes my nervous system its plaything. In the world of vertebrates, the rattle is the only other sound producing anatomical appendage in the evolutionary record, aside from vocal chords. All of that great work, of setting the vastness of genetic momentum into place —all for an animal which itself doesn’t even possess ears in the mammalian sense of the term.
Why? How? For what purpose?
How the rattlesnake evolved its rattle is an open-ended evolutionary fiction. Specialists in the field of evolutionary biology, such as those I am in contact with at the Chiricahua Desert Museum in remote southern New Mexico, have only flimsy theories and postulations about where and how the rattle evolved. Their theories are more like bar-side speculation than any hard scientific fact —there is simply a lack of physical evidence in the fossil record. What is certain though, is how the rattle forms and develops over the lifespan of a single individual: everytime the snake sheds its skin (ecdysis) it forms a new self-similar rattle segment, called a ‘button’. Each button encases the edges of the older one somewhat like a fractal, with the oldest segment being at the very end of the animal. The fact the rattle segments are both attached but disconnected is, at least partly, what characterizes its archetypal ‘buzzing’ sound.
