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
Huh. You mean the snakes *like* them frozen? Don’t you warm the furry critters up a bit first?
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.
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?