Salt Glands Revisited. 4. Aaron Myron Taub and the salt glands of sea snakes

Fifty-two years ago the late Jim Linzell and I were writing our monograph, Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles, for the Physiological Society's Monograph Series; it was published in May 1975. In this series I revisit some of the topics and people who followed up the discovery of salt glands in birds by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.

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Some scientists make an impact in a particular field early in their lives and then move on to other topics or into other jobs entirely. Their contributions therefore go unsung when histories and biographies are written about particular disciplines. The late Aaron M. Taub falls into that category. I was reminded of his work in the 1960s because it came up in my previous article on the very mild venomous nature of the Smooth Snake and I recalled his work on sea snakes which he did with Bill Dunson at Penn State University.

In the mid-1960s Dunson and Taub discovered salt glands in sea snakes. They did so by dinding a highly concentrated salt solution is excreted from the mouth and then set about finding which gland of the numerous candidates the salt was coming from. The search initially provided a false lead but later work by Bill Dunson after Taub had gone from the scene found the salt is secreted by what the posterior sublingual gland which empties into the tongue sheath. Thus the salt glands of sea snakes were found not to be nasal glands as in birds, nor orbital glands as in turtles.

As the decades have passed it now seems that the posterior sublingual gland has become a salt-secreting gland on three independent occasions during the evolution of snakes that live in marine or estuarine conditions: in the sea-kraits (genus Laticauda); in the common ancestor of the hydrophine sea snakes; in the unrelated snake Acrochordus granulatus. In addition, there is evidence that a different oral gland—the premaxillary—has evolved into a salt gland independently three or four times in those snakes of the family Homalopsidae, the mud snakes of Indo-Australia which live in a salty environment.

The number of glands opening into the oral cavity and their nomenclature has offered great scope for confusion since terms used for structures in snakes named after what were though to be their mammalian counterparts have been shown to be incorrect. For example, the ‘parotid’ gland of snakes was found not to be homologous with the mammalian parotid. The oral glands also perform a number of functions in addition to those like lubrication and defensive against microbes that we associate with mammalian saliva. Oral glands have become venom glands and, as described above, salt glands.

Laticauda colubrina, Banded Sea Krait
Jens Petersen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

It was Taub who made an early attempt to sort out the glands in the head of snakes. He published that work in 1966 and that is why he has been consistently quoted over the decades. His findings and suggestions for nomenclature, for example, have been discussed by those later on the scene, sometimes approvingly and sometimes disapprovingly. The nomenclature of the oral glands has proved contentious. His suggestion to name the ‘parotid’ of snakes as Duvernoy’s gland, in memory of George Louis Duvernoy (1777-1855) remains the term of choice for many working on the the venom-producing gland of rear-fanged snakes, despite its apparent homology with the ‘venom gland’ of front-fanged snakes.

Aaron Myron Taub was born in New Jersey on 21 December 1935. Searches in the usual genealogical sites and online newspaper archives, together with his own Linkedin profile which remains available have produced an outline of his life and what he did after moving on from matters herpetological. He was educated at Wagner College, New York in 1953-57 according to his Linkedin page. However, these dates may be out by a year since he can be found serving in the US Navy as a ‘hospitalman’ between December 1955 until mid 1957. Taub appears to have done most of his research while a postgraduate student with Carl Gans (1923-2009) at the State University of New York at Buffalo in, according to Linkedin, from 1960 until 1964. Thereafter he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Zoology at Penn State University at least until 1968 when his first son was born. It was there that he worked with Bill Dunson on sea snakes.

Aaron Taub then changed direction entirely. He worked for the Canadian and US subsidiaries of the now defunct British pharmaceutical and fertiliser company Fisons. By 1985 he was Senior Regulatory Affairs Scientist at the Fisons site in Bedford, Massachusetts. As well as being involved in various and apparently well known legal battles involving the company and the Food and Drug Administration of the USA, Taub also arranged the supply of an important leukotriene receptor antagonist the company had developed to those working on asthma and lung function. The Linkedin account suggests he retired from Fisons in 1992 and from 2009 was a patient at Highlands Living Centre, a nursing home in Pittsford, New York.

Aaron Myron Taub died on 18 April 2014 in Pittsford, leaving his wife, Rosemary (née Dessel), two children and three grandchildren.

And I cannot help but note that any ophidiophiles reading this article will realise that Taub’s second name, Myron, is also that of a genus of rear-fanged venomous snakes, commonly called ‘mangrove snakes’ found from Australia through Indonesia.

Publications in order of year published

Gans C, Taub AM. 1964. Precautions for keeping poisonous snakes in captivity. Curator. The Museum Journal 7, 196-205.

Taub AM. 1964. Antivenins available for the treatment of snake bite. Toxicon 2, 71-77.

Taub AM, Elliott WB. 1967. Some effects of snake venoms on mitochondria. Toxicon 2, 87-92.

Taub AM. 1966. Ophidian cephalic glands. Journal of Morphology 118, 529-541.

Taub AM, Dunson WA. 1966. Salt glands in sea snakes (Squamata, Laticauda). American Zoologist 6, 18.

Dunson WA, Taub AM. 1966. A new gland in sea snakes (Squamata, Reptilia). American Zoologist 6, 365.

Taub AM. 1967. Comparative Histological Studies on Duvernoy’s gland of colubrid snakes. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 138, 1-50.

Taub AM, Dunson WA. 1967. The salt gland in a sea snake (Laticauda). Nature 215, 995-996.

Dunson WA, Taub AM. 1967. Extrarenal salt excretion in sea snakes (Laticauda). American Journal of Physiology 213, 975-982.

de Oliveira L, Gower DJ, Wilkinson M, Segall M. 2024. Comparative morphology of oral glands in snakes of the family Homalopsidae reveals substantial variation and additional independent origins of salt glands within Serpentes. Journal of Anatomy 244, 708-721. DOI: 10.1111/joa.14005

Jackson TNW, Young B, Underwood G, McCarthy CJ, Kochva E, Vidal N, van der Weerd, L, Nabuurs R, Dobson J, Whitehead D, Vonk FJ, Hendrikx I, Hay C, Fry BG. 2016. Endless forms most beautiful: the evolution of ophidian oral glands, including the venom system, and the use of appropriate terminology for homologous structures. Zoomorphology 136, 107-130. DOI 10.1007/s00435-016-0332-9