Interesting Study on Crustacean-Eating Snakes including One That will Rip a Crab to P

[Ax01]

looks like i ran outta space in the thread title but the full title of this thread was gonna be "Interesting Study on Crustacean-Eating Snakes including One That will Rip a Crab to Pieces with It's Mouth to Eat It Piece By Piece"

recently i read this cool article about this mud/water snake in SE Asia that eats crabs then it linked to college journal where this hip professor/biologist is really into snakes. his name is Bruce Jayne and among his studies are these 3 species of mud/water snakes and what they ate and how they ate it. the coolest snake would hunt and wait for a crab to molt before eating it! it would have like a 20minute window before the crab's shell hardens again and it would rip it to swallow it piece by piece. it's kinda brutal but very fascinating in how they hunt and evolved.

here's some of the article:

The vast majority of snakes swallow their prey whole. However, the cat-eyed water snake (Gerarda prevostiana) from the mangroves of southeast Asia likes to do things differently, according to a new study published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

These animals violently rip their food to pieces, which is especially impressive given that they feast on spiky crabs.

A team of researchers from the University of Cincinnati (UC) found that the snakes wait until a crab has just moulted (crabs periodically shed their hard exoskeleton and replace it with a new one). New shells are much softer than usual, but they quickly harden.

"The snakes only have about a 20-minute window to eat the crab the way they really like them," Bruce Jayne, a UC biologist told the university magazine.

If the snake catches a crab during this window, it will be soft enough to rip apart. Night vision footage captured by Jayne shows a cat-eyed water snake biting a crab before pinning it down and crushing it with its body. It then proceeds to brutally tear off pieces from it, eating them one by one.

This method requires a lot of effort, but the rewards are significant—the cat-eyed water snake can eat prey up to four times bigger than what they would be capable of swallowing whole, giving them a survival advantage.

read the rest here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/offbe...AvFBQY#image=1

and here's the college journal. there's some cool pix of Dr. Jayen and his cute snakes: http://magazine.uc.edu/editors_picks...crabsnake.html

here's a of one of the crab eating snakes in action...



snakes: some don't constrict or swallow prey whole.