If you’ve ever wanted to know what you look like with what might look like a snake sinking its painful, deadly fangs into you, you’re in the wrong place. In a new study here today, scientists have captured the high feet of snakes as they move in for the kill.
Researchers in Australia and France have carefully (and safely) recorded dozens of species in three families of painfully moving wasps. They found that these birds have important differences in the way they attack their prey and deliver the venom. The findings show the most extensive documentation of painful snakebites
“This gives us the first opportunity to directly compare these three families of venomous snakes,” Lead author Alistair Evans, a scientist who studies the evolution of biomechanics at Moomechanics, told Gizmodo.
How to safely watch a snake bite
Evans has long studied how animals eat, particularly in their use of teeth. One of his new PHD students, Silke Cleuren, was very interested in marking snakes. Recent advances in video technology have now made it possible to capture snake strike patterns and bites in better detail than ever before.
But while Australia has its fair share of native venomous snakes, living close to home would have limited how many scientists could document under managed care. Instead, they are working with scientists in France who have partnered with Venomworld, a painkiller in the country. This allowed them to closely study, for the first time, species from all three major families of venomous snakes: viper, elapid, and colubrid snakes.
All told, they recorded 36 species and over 100 bites. Additionally, don’t worry: snakes are only a piece of ballistics gel wrapped around a cylinder that aims to imitate prey.
“The main advantages of our study are that we examined the full strike behavior of a very large number of species while at the same level, and we reversed them at high speed (1,000 frames per second) and reconstructed them. “All previous studies had a limited number of species – usually less than 10.”
No two snakes are the same
The team found all kinds of differences between different snake families.
The vpers, basically by careful guesswork, had the fastest spells; For example, their fangs reach their prey within milliseconds after making a strike, and they move very quickly when they are about to attack their prey. They were also often more selective, because they would only close their jaws and send poison to domesticated subjects on their prey if the fangs were firmly secured. If their first bite didn’t land right, the snakes would remove their fangs and bite again.
“Snakes that prey on mammals were also fast – in fact, some snakes were faster than the uterine response, which means that snakes bite their prey before moving,” said many people).
Elapid snakes (including Cobras) would panic when they came to eat their meal, and they would bite their victims repeatedly to deliver their deadly venom. Colebrid snakes have their fangs at the back of their mouths, which means their bite must cut tightly around their prey. They also tend to slide their jaws from the side to bite, creating crescent-shaped cracks in their jaws for re-entry.
The findings, published Thursday in the journal Biology, provide another “important piece of the puzzle” of how snakes have adapted their lifestyles to predation,” Evans said.
Although his group doesn’t plan to pursue this particular project, he notes that there is much more for other researchers to explore. They are very readable histories, for example, which means that future similar studies may include a larger selection of elapid and colubrid snakes. “It would be very interesting to see more about how the beetles differ in their approach to work of different sizes and in different environments,” he added.
Personally, I’m just happy that my nightmares will now have realistically realistic details to draw from.
