Quote Originally Posted by Coluber42 View Post
First of all, wild snakes that eat prey they have just killed do not get burned by the prey's natural body temperature.

Snake flesh burns basically the same as human flesh does. The reason snakes can get burned by unregulated UTH's is two things: one, if their body is insulating the heat source, the temperature can climb gradually until it is much warmer than it would get with nothing on top of it. The other reason is that if the snake sits on a hot surface for a long time and its belly is gradually getting warmer and warmer, it doesn't notice.
Supposedly this occasionally happens with humans too. People get burned by heating pads without realizing or while they're sleeping because your skin doesn't really detect absolute temperatures, it detects the difference between the skin and other objects. If you run one hand under cold water for awhile and the other hand under hot water for awhile and then stick both hands into tepid water, the tepid water will feel cold to one hand and hot to the other hand. In the case of a hot pad that is plugged in, the total amount of heat energy is effectively limitless because as it transfers heat to whatever it's sitting on, the heat pad keeps making more. So your skin gradually heats up and you don't feel the hot pad as being hot, because your skin is hot too. Until you take it off and your skin is all red.

But a rodent that has been swallowed doesn't have very much total heat in it, even if it is over 100°. The heat energy in the body of the rodent gets dissipated and there isn't enough to burn anything.

That said, if you overheat the rodent or try to heat it too quickly, you'll end up cooking the skin which will then split and make a mess. But again, a mouse or rat's skin can handle being 100°; that's in the range of its normal body temperature.
Ah! That makes a lot of sense.

Also part of this was not bothering to look up body temperatures for mice. (I thought they were in the 70's, for some reason... so I thought 80° was pushing it... )


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