Welcome to our daily dose of Bitachon series. We're now in Shaar Habechina and we're going to go into the world of reptiles as the Chovat Halevavot gave us a directive to look into the things that crawl and slither. Let's look to the signs of wisdom in general before we go into the specifics. The first one is their thermal engineering. Unlike birds and mammals that must burn food constantly to stay warm, reptiles are engineered as ectotherms. We'll see what that means in a minute. A reptile's metabolism is designed to be switched off or slowed down to a fraction of a mammal's rate and they use the sun as an external battery. This allows a large reptile like a crocodile survive for months or even a year without a single meal while a mammal spends ninety percent of its energy just maintaining its body's temperature, the reptile is a masterpiece of energy conservation. It only spends its energy when it's absolutely necessary for the hunt. Parenthetically, that's why they're known as cold-blooded versus hot-blooded. Mammals are hot-blooded, we have to constantly heat up our bodies. That's one very interesting thing about the reptiles. The next one is their ability to see. Many reptiles live close to the ground or hunt in the dark and therefore they possess sensory tools that go beyond the five human senses. They have what we call chemical sight. When a snake flicks its forked tongue, it isn't tasting the air, it's collecting chemical molecules and delivering them to an organ in the roof of its mouth. The fork shape allows the snake to smell in stereo. It can detect if a scent is stronger on the left or the right, providing a chemical map of its surroundings. Other snakes have thousands of heat-sensitive nerve endings on their faces. This allows the snake to see the heat signatures of warm-blooded prey in total darkness. They can detect temperature changes as small as .003 Celsius. So they basically have a built-in night vision provided by Hashem himself. Now one of the things we're supposed to look into is their special form and structure, the snake which lacks legs as we Jewish people know as a punishment for the sin of the original snake, yet God in his mercy is going to let them have a different locomotion of moving without limbs. How does this work? A snake's spine can have up to four hundred vertebrae to give a perspective, humans only have thirty-three. Each of these vertebrae has a pair of ribs attached to powerful muscles. This allows for rectilinear locomotion where the snake moves in a straight line by rippling its belly scales like a conveyor belt. It can climb, swim, and burrow all without a single limb. So whereas God on one hand limited their ability to walk but God created a different path of function which is this type of serpentine movement. That's why it has the term serpentine movement because it's the movement of a serpent. That's our little introduction to the world of creeping, crawling reptiles and creatures. Many of them lizards and we will get to more of it.