As the coils wrapped around the animal
squeeze ever tighter, so its vital force is sucked out, its eyes glazing
over… It’s the falling of a final curtain we see all too clearly in the
image above, which shows a sand snake with a large rodent of some kind
and about to swallow its prey. „One pair of eyes has [a] glitter of joy,
the other [the] gloom of death. This is nature unplugged,“ says
photographer, Chandan. We see what he means, yet this prey animal is
small by comparison with those that are to follow…
Python pulling itself over most of an impala’s head, the victim’s ears still exposed.
Death comes in many forms, but one of
the most dramatic and disturbing is the way some snakes constrict their
prey. Seeing a hapless impala or goat wrapped in the coils of a
beady-eyed reptile, the life draining out of them, seems a terrible way
for the animal to die, but new information suggests such a death may
actually be quicker than once was thought.
7. Python Consuming Female Goat
This is an absolutely incredible picture
of an African rock python constricting and attempting to swallow a
female goat. The python itself is huge, 15 feet long, and may well
manage to consume the whole thing.
Snakes that constrict their prey are
generally non-venomous. Among them are anacondas, pythons, king snakes,
carpet snakes and boa constrictors. If the prey are smaller mammals, the
snake strikes and pulls them into its coils; if larger, it pulls itself
onto and around the prey.
6. Python and Buck
This 10-foot rock python, again
photographed in Africa, is struggling to eat a buck deer. It pulled
itself up around the body of the deer over the course of half an hour
but in the end regurgitated it all. It seems its eyes were bigger than
its belly.
5. Carpet Snake Eating Large Chicken
Here we have an amazing shot of a carpet
snake eating a monster-sized chicken. Carpet snakes are approximately 2
meters long. Hanging upside down, the snake will swallow the whole
thing. Note how it eats its prey headfirst, as do all constrictors.
Once, it was thought that death by
constriction was caused by asphyxia or suffocation, with the snake
holding its prey too tightly to allow the prey to take a breath, but new
research shows the death comes through different means (and what the
snakes don’t do is crush their prey to death, as myth would have it).
4. Diamond Python Eating Ringtail Possum
Researchers noticed that many prey
animals died more quickly than would be expected from asphyxia, and some
now believe that the constriction may be causing such a great internal
rise in pressure that the heart cannot deal with it. The prey dies from
quick cardiac arrest in this case.
3. Python with Spotted Deer
The new hypothesis on how the prey die
is still being researched, but one thing scientists do know is that the
snakes have the ability to exert enough pressure. The most powerful is
the green anaconda, which can apply 4,000kg of pressure with its coils.
The teeth of pythons and other
constrictor snakes help to push the prey down the throat, while their
muscles move it down to the stomach. It can take days for food to be
digested and hours for the snakes to consume the prey when it is large.
The python above is gulping down a fully-grown spotted deer in the
forests of India’s Mudumalai National Park.
2. Python Coiled Around Impala
This next image might provide some
anecdotal evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the prey dies from
rising pressure in its body cavity causing a heart attack. As you can
see the python’s coils are around the impala’s lower body, not its ribs.
There have been cases in medical annals
of human infants being killed by constrictors, and you can see how it
could happen. Fortunately such cases are rare.
1. Python with Impala
Constrictors show how incredibly strong
they are with their ability to kill animals so much larger than they.
This last image shows a python that had previously eaten the head of its
victim and was now up to the impala’s shoulders. „By the next morning,“
says photographer Tina Owens, „it was gone.“
As all these images show, nature can be
cruel yet at the same time amazing. It is one thing for a frog to
swallow a fly whole, but for these snakes to take larger mammals is one
majorly big mouthful.
Bonus: Boa Constrictor Eating Large Rodent
Boa constrictors like the one pictured
here are mostly ambush predators that lie hidden in wait for prey, but
they do actively hunt on occasion.
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