Kindness Todd Or facing an Asian cookery snake in Thailand. These snakes use their teeth to cut and lower prey in the upper jaws of their bodies, dipping their heads into the abdominal cavity and eating on the limbs at a time, while the frogs are still alive, leaving the rest of the carcass untouched.
As you step out of the awful state of that sentence, “maybe you’ll be glad to know that cookie snakes are thankful, harmful to humans,” amateur herpetologist and naturalist Henrik Bringes, lead author of a new study describing a terrible technique, Said in a statement.
This horrible eating habit was previously unheard of Snake; While some prey get out of their prey, most snakes devour their food completely. Brinsy and his colleagues report that scientists have never buried a snake’s head before to cut off an animal’s internal organs – sometimes it takes hours to do so, Bringsy and his colleagues said.
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The victims of this horrible limb-slurping were called poisonous toads Dattaphrinus melanocyticus, Also known as Asian common toads or Asian black-spotted toads; They range in length from about 2 to 3 inches (57 to 85 millimeters) Animal Diversity Web (ADW), a wildlife database maintained by the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology. During this deadly battle, Todd fought for his life “vigorously”, some of whom were defensively hiding toxic white matter. The researchers wrote that the snakes’ dangerous flight strategy could be a way to avoid the toxic secretion of frogs while still enjoying delicious food.
Cookery snakes in Oligodon The genus is so named because its cutting teeth resemble a squirrel that goes beyond the eyebrows. While cookie snakes are not a threat to people, their teeth can cause painful lasers that cause heavy blood to flow, as snakes secrete anticoagulants from specific oral glands, the study found.
“This secretion produced by the two glands, called the Duvarnoy glands and located behind the snake’s eyes, is potentially beneficial when the snake spends hours in the limbs,” explains Bringes.
Macabre meal time
Researchers describe three observations of the Kukri snake in Thailand (Oligodon fasciolatus), Which can measure up to 45 inches (115 centimeters) long, used by Asian common toads. In the first incident in 2016, the frog was already dead when witnesses discovered the scene, “but the soil around the two animals was bloody, indicating that there was a fight that eventually killed the frog,” the scientists wrote. The snake carries wood by turning its head from side to side in the frog’s body; He then slowly inserts his head into the wound “and then removes organs such as the liver, heart, lungs and parts of the gastrointestinal tract.”
In another incident, on April 22, 2020, the epic battle between the Kukri snake and the frog lasted about three hours; The snake attacked, withdrew, and attacked again, only temporarily prevented by the frog’s venom defense. According to research, while the frog was still breathing, after capturing the frog, the snake swallowed the raked limbs.
On June 5, 2020, the cookery snake took a different approach and did not land the frog, but instead ate it whole. But in the fourth observation on June 19 this year, the snake cut its limbs to reach the food of its limbs, expelling its frog prey.
Young toads produce less venom than potential adults, which may enable the snake to pull it down safely in one piece on June 5 observation; Another possibility is that cookery snakes are immune to the venom of the frog species, but they descend on adults, as the frogs are too large for them to swallow, the researchers said.
However, there is not yet enough data to answer these questions, Bringsi said in a statement.
“We hope to continue to observe and report these beautiful snakes as we uncover more interesting aspects of their biology,” he said.
These findings are published in the journal 11 September Herpetozoa.
Published on Original Living Science.
