![]() Like all pumps, it can deliver its liquid load only into a zone of lower pressure. You need to realise that the heart is a pump. Within 60 seconds, the heart rate dropped from over 400 beats per minute to about half. If the rat had been conscious, it would have become unconscious from a lack of blood to the brain. As per normal, the snake struck the rat's head to render it unconscious, and immediately coiled its body around the rodent.Īs the rat's blood pressure and heart rate data flooded onto their computer screen, they were astonished to see that within six seconds, the blood pressure dropped down to half. They then offered "robo-rat" to their tame and hungry boa constrictor. They anaesthetised a rat, and implanted inside it a whole bunch of measuring devices, using modern technology. They wanted to put the crushers to the test. This was the background to the research by Dr Scott M Boback and colleagues. So maybe the python could squeeze with a lot of force… When his corpse was examined at autopsy, he was found to have multiple fractures in his ribs, neck and the rest of his spinal cord. For example, there was the case of a Malaysian man who had been killed by a python doing its 'constrictor' thing, and was being swallowed, head first.īefore the rest of his body had gone in, he had been pulled out of the python. There was no real squeezing as such.īut there were a few inconsistencies with the suffocation theory. After several such tightenings, the rat couldn't get any air into its lungs and would shortly die of suffocation. At that exact moment, so went the perceived wisdom, the python would tighten up its grip another notch. Well, until 2015, the accepted opinion among the snake scientists, or herpetologists to give them their proper name, was suffocation.Įach time the rat (or whatever their intended meal is) breathes out, it makes its own ribcage a bit smaller. You'll appreciate how hard this is when you realise that to win a gold medal, an Olympic sprinter will crank up their energy output to 20 times normal - and only for 10 seconds (not 45 times, for three days). They have to crank up their energy output to up to 45 times normal - and keep it there for a few days. It takes a huge amount of work to do this. That means they have to suddenly regrow their gut back into existence. Pythons can eat an animal that actually weighs more than they do - up to one-and-a-half times their own weight. You see, it takes a lot of energy to run a gut - all those enzymes and liquids to manufacture and recycle. To cut down on energy usage, they actually shrink their gut down to practically nothing. ![]() They can go for up to two years without a feed. ![]() Surprisingly, it was only as recently as 2015 that we discovered how they kill their prey. All you need is eyes on the front of your head, sharp eyes and ears to find your next dinner, lots of muscles on your trunk and limbs, and some weaponry such as big teeth, big claws or big talons.īut what if you have no arms or legs, no ears, no eyelids, and no claws or talons? In the animal world, it's easy to be a top predator. Olive python makes meal of agile wallaby in Northern Territory, ?.Audio: How does a python kill its prey? (Science Online Audio).
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