To Scientists' Surprise, Even Nonvenomous Snakes Can Strike at Ridiculous Speeds

Smithsonian ^ | 15 Mar, 2016 | Marcus Woo

[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.

[Mogger]

Habu.

[no-s]

Smokey with a smaller rattler.

We once had a mother cat that would bring us snacks, eg birds, lizards, rats, etc. She would walk right up to us or jump in our laps with the prize and make "mothering" noises. As far as ol' Fluffy (an improbable name for a shorthair) could tell we were all "slow" kittens who needed to learn to hunt, so she would often bring barely alive critters who might need a little more killing to be completely dead.

One evening my mom (the actual human mother) went to leave by the front door and stopped dead in her tracks with an incredible shriek. It seemed the cat had brought us a feast of rattlesnakes, laid 'em out by the front door for our feasting pleasure. We had developed a rattlesnake den under the slab, practically a cave. Fluffy had found the exit hole and picked 'em off as they slithered to and fro. Dozens, average about a 16 inches but a few 2-footers, just laid out nice and neat and ready to eat, all with broken necks but some still wriggling the way dead snakes will sometimes if you don't kill them completely.

Fluffy was so proud of me, I got the shovel and separated every snake head from every snake body. And yes, rattlesnake does taste remarkably like some kind of gamey chicken.