Skin of a 22.6-foot reticulated python, shot by Kekek Aduanan (in hat) on June 9, 1970. These big snakes aren’t shy about going after much larger, more dangerous game, too. Devouring bunnies and possums isn't even the half of it, though. These population drops all occur in the same areas where pythons and other large, non-native snakes have taken up residence after escaping from one stop or another in the wildlife trade supply chain.Īnyone who’s even heard only the most basic facts about constrictor snakes knows that they’re formidable predators and take down prey by grasping it in their powerful jaws, coiling their bodies around it, and squeezing until it suffocates. Titanoboa – thirteen metres, one tonne, largest snake ever.Earlier this week a team of scientists from several universities and the US Geological Survey released a study documenting the dramatically declining numbers of small and medium-size mammals in Florida - including raccoons, opossums, white-tailed deer, bobcats, rabbits and foxes.‘Wasabi protein’ responsible for the heat-seeking sixth sense of rattlesnakes.A recipe for growing bigger hearts, found in the blood of pythons.Meet the Agta, a tribe where a quarter of men have been attacked by giant snakes.Snake modulates constriction in response to prey’s heartbeat. Reference: Boback, Hall, McCann, Hayes, Forrester & Zwemer. A constrictor’s sensitive side may have evolved from sensitive sides. Perhaps the ability to sense the ground beneath their limbless bodies made it easier for early snakes to detect the life signs of their prey. For such animals, the line between still and dead is much subtler, and constrictors would need more acute senses to be able to confirm the time of death. For example, a lizard like an iguana can slow its heart to just one beat every 5 minutes, and stay underwater for up to 4.5 hours. He speculates that the earliest snakes from the late Cretaceous period would have often fed on cold-blooded prey, which can cope for much longer without any oxygen. Is it really worth being able to sense a victim’s heart if all that does is save a few seconds of effort?īoback thinks so. Birds and mammals need a lot of oxygen to fuel their burning metabolisms, and a constrictor should be able to kill them in just a few minutes. It would seem to make sense for the snake to precisely detect when its prey has breathed its last.īut there’s something about this logic that doesn’t quite add up. The snake’s metabolism can shoot up by seven times, and all the while, it’s vulnerable to attack. Squeezing the breath out of an animal takes a lot of energy. This suggests that constrictors have an innate ability to react to a victim’s heart, but experience tells them how strongly they should do so. They did, however, use less pressure than the wild ones. They had never killed a victim with an actual heartbeat before, but they responded to the artificial beats in the same way as the wild snakes. Some of Boback’s boas had been caught in the wild, but others had been reared in captivity and had always lived on a diet of dead rats. If Boback stopped the hearts after 10 minutes, the pythons stopped constricting a few minutes later.
And all the while, they kept on tightening, bit by bit. If the artificial hearts were beating, the boas constricted the rats for twice as long and with twice as much pressure as when the hearts were still. In this way, he could isolate the influence of the heartbeats he didn’t have to worry about other movements that might confuse the results, such as struggling muscles or panicked breaths.īoback clearly showed that boas finely adjust their coils to the beats of their prey. He fitted the bodies of dead rats with artificial hearts – two tiny water-filled bulbs connected to a pump – and pressure sensors to measure the snake’s squeezes. It would be virtually impossible to measure the heartbeat of a live rat while it was being crushed by a snake, so Boback opted for a macabre alternative. When the heart stops, the snake starts to relax. Through its thick coils, a boa can sense the tiny heartbeats of its prey. Scott Boback from Dickinson College has the answer. We’ve known this for centuries but amazingly, no one has worked out how the snakes can tell when to stop constricting. Every time the prey exhales, the snake squeezes a little more tightly. It uses the momentum of its strike to throw coils around its victim’s body. To a boa constrictor, those beats are simply a sign that it hasn’t finished killing yet.Ī constricting snake like a boa or a python kills its prey by suffocation. To fans of cheesy pop music, the beat of someone else’s heart is a symbol of romantic connection.