Here is old Smokey with a harmless rat snake.
Posted on 03/16/2016 6:11:27 PM PDT by MtnClimber
The Texas rat snake was just as much of a speed demon as deadly vipers, challenging long-held notions about snake adaptations.
When a snake strikes, it literally moves faster than the blink of an eye, whipping its head forward so quickly that it can experience accelerations of more than 20 Gs. Such stats come from studies of how a snake lunges, bites and kills, which have focused mostly on vipers, in part because these snakes rely so heavily on their venomous chomps.
"It's the lynchpin of their strategy as predators," says Rulon Clark at San Diego State University. "Natural selection has optimized a series of adaptations around striking and using venom that really helps them be effective predators."
That means scientists have long assumed vipers must have the speediest strikes in town. "There's this kind of preemptive discussion that [vipers] are faster," says David Penning at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.
Not so fast: When Penning and his colleagues compared strike speeds in three types of snakes, they found that at least one nonvenomous species was just as quick as the vipers. The results hint that serpents' need for speed may be much more widespread than thought, which raises questions about snake evolution and physiology.....
They put each snake inside a container and inserted a stuffed glove on the end of a stick. They waved the glove around until the animal struck, recording the whole thing with a high-speed camera. The team tested 14 rat snakes, 6 cottonmouths and 12 rattlesnakes, recording several strikes for each individual.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
I had a dog who could actually dodge snake strikes.
Pretty amazing really.
Honestly, it seems like scientists are not getting, well, dumber.
I don’t see how this is such a surprise...
Most all snakes (excepting constrictors) use their mouth to capture food...
How many gees do you pull to do a double post? Must be about as much as a snake’s strike cause it was faster than my mouse.
Nature. The quick....and the dead. It’s how they get dinner.
Snakes either kill their supper by venom or constriction.
Since most of their prey is very capable of inflicting potentially fatal damage to them, given half a chance, they *have* to grab and incapacitate as quickly as possible.
Boas are non-venomous and even after all these years of dangling their ratsicles in front of them, I *still* involuntarily flinch a little when they hit the dead rat.
Why am I not being paid to state obvious things?
;D
Gee willikers!
Gee, Wally!
I'd say about three 'G's (8^D)
Constrictors use their mouths.
They seize the prey, maintain a grip on it and then rapidly throw coils around it, causing the circulatory system/heart to “explode”.
[it’s not purely “suffocation”, as some think]
Maybe it could teach our bulldog some of that action.
Seems our pooch gets plunked by a copperhead at least once a year.
Huh. You mean the snakes *like* them frozen? Don’t you warm the furry critters up a bit first?
Yeah, of course.
I just call them mouseicles and ratsicles, anyway.
:)
I have encountered many snakes in my outdoor activities around the world. Observations:
Rattlesnakes (Eastern Diamondback and Pigmy) - Very Fast
Water Moccasin - Fast
Coral Snake - Very Slow
Coachwhip - Very fast and hurt
Corn Snake - Fast
Cobra - Fairly Slow
Here is old Smokey with a harmless rat snake.
That’s a good point, because anything that even wounds them enough to make them a worse hunter is a likely fatal, at least in the wild.
Freegards
“Boas are non-venomous and even after all these years of dangling their ratsicles in front of them, I *still* involuntarily flinch a little when they hit the dead rat.
Why am I not being paid to state obvious things?”
You could have recorded your snakes strike with a high speed video camera and measured the speed and calculated the accelerations involved. Then you could have posted it on youtube and made money off of it.
In fact, as your snakes are not one of the species listed, you could still do so, show it as additional new reasearch (new species) and still get lots of hits.
Go for it.
That’s true...I was mistaken...Thanks...
Some snakes are neither venomous nor constrictors. They are simply ambush hunters. Milk snakes are common and harmless. They eat a wide variety of things, but one example would be a cricket. They strike fast and get the cricket before it reacts. Then they swallow it.
Scientists don’t know this stuff?
Here is Smokey with a dead rattler.
Something is slow today. I hit Post and nothing happened. I waited a long time and still nothing happened so I hit post again. When I just hit Reply it took about 20 seconds to work.
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