Can a snake eat a person alive? The giant anaconda, where it lives, what it eats, is the anaconda dangerous, facts. The biggest anaconda
Giant anaconda called a water boa - a non-venomous snake. The snake got its name from a Tamil word that appears with the word anaconda, means “killer of elephants”, but in Latin the translation is “good swimmer”. Etymologists believe that the rattlesnake made similar sounds, which is why it was called that. Where does such a snake live, what does it eat and how long does it live? This is what we will talk about.
Where does the anaconda live?
The length of a large snake is more than 5 meters, weight 97 kg or more. Scientists have found that anaconda 9 to 11 meters long - this is a myth, since its length does not exceed 6.5 meters. The snake's body is divided into a tail and a huge body with 435 vertebrae. Its ribs are mobile and allow it to swallow very large prey. Scull anacondas consists of movable bones connected to each other by ligaments. It is thanks to this feature that it opens its mouth wide and swallows its prey whole. Highly located eyes and nostrils allow you to breathe underwater. Its eyes allow it to quickly track prey rather than focus, thanks to transparent scales. Teeth giant anaconda, do not contain poison, although they are sharp and long, so the bite is not fatal to humans. An important organ of the snake is the tongue, which is responsible for taste and smell. The anaconda's skin is dry and dense, and all because it does not have mucous glands. But it is shiny, thanks to its scales. Its skin color is gray-green with yellow and olive undertones, and has black spots along its spine for camouflage.
Where does he live? giant anaconda?
Because giant anaconda conducts most its life in the water and is an excellent swimmer, it lives in quiet river beds, in swamps and in river backwaters. She occasionally crawls ashore and climbs trees. From the drought anaconda buries itself in the mud and waits for the rains. You can meet such a snake throughout South America, in Brazil, Peru, Guiana, Paraguay, Guyana, Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia.
How long does an anaconda live?
Anaconda can grow all its own life cycle, on early stage intensively, then the process slows down. Record how long you live giant anaconda, failed. It is known that 5-6 years snake lifespan on average, but a 28 year old snake was also found. Only God knows how long this monster can live.
ANACONDA FOOD, INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT ANACONDAS
What does an anaconda eat?
Giant anaconda hunting in the water or on the shore. She motionlessly waits for prey, then quite sharply pounces and wraps herself around the victim, strangling her. Her victim dies from suffocation, and not from broken bones. Sometimes, anaconda grabs prey with its teeth and swallows. Feeds turtles, swimming birds, iguanas, lizards, capybaras, peccaries, capybaras, agoutis, caimans, tupinanbis and even large snakes. They become prey and domestic animals such as cats, dogs and chickens. Anaconda for a long time may be without food because food takes several weeks to digest.
People were afraid anacondas and considered her a bloodthirsty snake, in fact, only one attack was recorded on a teenage boy from an Indian tribe.
People promised huge money for giant anaconda 9 meters, but its length is no more than 6 meters 70 cm.
In America, anaconda was the best and scariest character for films.
Anaconda does not know how to paralyze the victim with his gaze! They can only put you into a stupor from their wild smell.
VIDEO: ABOUT ANACONDAS
IN THIS VIDEO YOU WILL SEE WHAT GIANT ANACONDAS LOOK AND LEARN A LOT OF INTERESTING
Incredible facts
Scientist Paul Rosolie(Paul Rosolie) recently announced his determination to become prey for the giant anaconda.
On the air of the program " Eaten alive"Discovery TV channel, a 27-year-old naturalist, dressed in a special suit, was supposed to swallow a 6-meter anaconda.
Anacondas this size can easily eat large mammals such as jaguars, deer and pigs.
Experts have developed special suit, which would protect a person from the teeth of a snake, as well as pressure and stomach acid. In addition, he was equipped with a camera and microphone to communicate with the team, and the scientist swallowed a capsule that monitored his vital signs.
Anaconda ate a man (video)
The only thing that experts could not predict was that the anaconda would not be at all interested in eating a person dressed in such a costume. Moreover, when Rosolie tried to approach the anaconda for the first time, it got scared and tried to crawl away.
Only, when the naturalist decided to provoke the animal, the snake attacked, squeezing its victim.
The snake coiled itself around a man covered in pig blood to make himself more appetizing to the predator. The anaconda began to swallow his head and as it squeezed, Rosolie began to feel his arm breaking.
The naturalist was not ready for such a turn and immediately called for help.
In the film, Rosolie compares the strength of an anaconda to the strength of an entire team of horses. " The last thing I remembered was her mouth open, and then everything went black", he said.
Many the audience was disappointed long-awaited filming, and the defenders environment expressed their outrage, considering the experiment cruel.
However, as the naturalist himself explained, the purpose of the stunt was to raise funds to save anaconda habitats in South America and the animal was not harmed.
The biggest anaconda
· Anaconda is considered the heaviest snake in the world. Its weight can reach 250 kg, which is almost 3 times the average weight of a person.
· The longest big anaconda can reach about 9 meters, A average length is 6 meters.
· Anacondas are not poisonous, but they are skilled predators. They hunt their prey (pigs, tapirs, caimans and fish, sometimes jaguars) using vision and heat sensors.
· Anacondas attack in a matter of seconds, and as soon as the animal is in the grip, they wrap themselves in rings around it, suffocating or crushing the victim.
· Anacondas typically live in wetlands and rivers, and they are excellent swimmers.
· Exists 4 types of anacondas: Green anaconda, yellow anaconda, spotted anaconda and the newly discovered Bolivian anaconda. They all live in South America.
Can a snake swallow a person?
"Women are like birds: they know everything, but say little. Men know nothing, but talk a lot." African proverb
A giant 20- or even 30-meter snake, hiding on a branch, lies in wait for its prey. From a blow to the crown of her head, hard as a stone, a man taken by surprise falls almost unconscious to the ground, and the snake, with a lightning-fast throw, rushes at him and wraps him in its coils, breaking all his bones in an iron embrace. This happens in cases where brave liberators who cut the snake into pieces with knives do not arrive in time to help...
Descriptions of such heartbreaking scenes can be found in many adventure novels and even in other reports of expeditions to the unexplored tropics.
Do giant snakes really attack humans? Are they capable of swallowing us? There are hardly any other animals that are fantasized about as much as pythons, anacondas or boa constrictors. And therefore, it is precisely with regard to these animals that even a specialist finds it very difficult in each individual case to decide what is true and what is fiction.
This starts with determining the length. Even serious travelers have claimed that anacondas 30 or even 40 meters long are found in the Amazon forests. But they, as a rule, kept silent about whether they saw and measured these snakes themselves or know this from eyewitness accounts.
Anaconda is the same boa constrictor, only South American. It is she who is considered the largest and strongest among all the giant snakes in the world. Another South American snake, also no less famous and also a boa constrictor (Constrictor), reaches a length of “only” five to six meters.
It must be said that measuring a snake is not so easy. It is most convenient to do this, of course, when it stretches to its full length. But for big snake such a pose is completely unnatural; some of them are simply not able to accept it - they need to bend at least the very end of their tail to the side in order to have support. Such a strong animal will not voluntarily allow itself to be straightened for measurement. In a dead snake, the body usually becomes so ossified that it is even more difficult to measure. If you judge the length of snakes by their skins that go on sale, then it is very easy to fall into a mistake: after all, this skin is sold by the meter, and therefore while it is fresh, it can be stretched in length by 20 percent, and some say even by 50 Snake hunters often use this.
It is interesting that live snakes are also sold by the meter. Snake traders charge zoos for small and medium-sized pythons from 80 pfennig to one mark for every centimeter. The New York Zoological Society announced many years ago that it would pay 20 thousand marks to anyone who brought a live anaconda over ten meters long; however, no one has yet been able to earn this tempting amount.
And yet it is quite possible that such giants exist or existed until very recently. The weight of such an animal should be quite impressive; Thus, the Asian reticulated python measures 8.8 meters and weighs 115 kilograms. It’s no wonder that such a colossus, living in the thicket virgin forest, without a whole horde of assistants it is not so easy to defeat. And then you still need to be able to deliver it unharmed to the airfield or port.
The record length of the hieroglyphic python (Python sebae), widespread in Africa, is 9.8 meters. The Indian or tiger python (Python molurus) reaches 6.6 meters, the East Asian reticulated python (Python reticulatus) - either 8.4 meters or 10 meters, depending on which source you believe. A little smaller than the amethyst python.
So, in fact, we have already listed all six giants of the snake world: four oviparous pythons - natives of the Old World and two viviparous boas - of the New World. Among the 2,500 species of snakes that inhabit Earth, there are a number of other species of boas and pythons, but they are much smaller.
Giant snakes are not poisonous. Unlike the fat giants of the snake kingdom Poisonous snakes(for example, the African mamba, sometimes reaching four meters, and even longer - King Cobra) thinner and slimmer.
It takes a snake a lot of time to reach its enormous size. The eight-meter reticulated python living at the Pittsburgh Zoo grew by only 25 centimeters in a year. The older a snake gets, the slower it grows.
By appearance It is completely impossible to determine whether a snake is a female or a male. A pair of hieroglyphic pythons, which arrived at the New York Zoo at the age of one, grew at the same rate for the first six to seven years, but then the female began to noticeably lag in growth. The fact is that during this time she became sexually mature and began to lay eggs annually. At the same time, she fasted for six months each time: during the maturation of the eggs and when she warmed them by curling up around them.
We don’t know to what age giant snakes can live in the wild. No one has ever ringed them in their habitats, as has been done for decades, for example, with migratory birds. We can judge their age only from data obtained from zoos. The anaconda lived the longest at the Washington Zoo - 28 years (from 1899 to 1927). One of the boas lived in England at the Bristol Zoo for 23 years and 3 months, and the hieroglyphic python reached the age of eighteen there. Tiger python at the San Diego Zoo (California) lived to be 22 years and 9 months, and two East Asian reticulated pythons - one in London and the other in Paris - died at the age of 21 years.
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The giants of the snake kingdom are the only large animals on earth that do not have a voice, like, in fact, all other snakes. At best they can hiss. Snakes are not only mute, but also deaf. They do not perceive sound vibrations in the air: they do not have ears for this, like other animals. But they perfectly perceive any, even the most insignificant, shaking of the soil or litter on which they rest.
In addition, these deaf-mute giants also have poor vision. Their eyes are devoid of movable eyelids, and the transparent leathery film that protects the eye during each molt is separated along with all the skin and removed, like glass from a watch. The snake eye lacks the muscles of the iris, therefore the pupil cannot contract in bright light and dilate in dim light. The snake’s eyes barely react to changes in lighting: the lens in it cannot bend, like ours, which deprives snakes of the opportunity to more carefully examine objects located at close or far distances at will. To look at anything, the snake has to move its entire head first and then back. Perhaps all these are very useful properties (necessary, for example, for swimming and especially for looking at various items under water), but, by God, much more advanced eyes are found in the animal world.
Since the python, like other snakes, does not close its eyes during sleep, it is always very difficult to determine whether it is sleeping or awake. Some snake researchers argue that a sleeping snake faces downwards, meaning its pupil is at the bottom edge of the eye; others dispute this claim.
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The immobility of snake eyes gave rise to the widely repeated fairy tale that snakes supposedly hypnotize, as if paralyzing their prey with their gaze. Frogs, lizards or small rodents do sometimes sit completely still in the presence of a giant boa constrictor, but this is explained for various reasons: sometimes they simply do not notice the danger, and sometimes they freeze with fear; such freezing brings them a certain benefit, since the snake does not distinguish a motionless victim. After all, it is only when the frog starts to gallop to escape that the snake overtakes it.
How, after all, do these deaf-mute and, moreover, short-sighted giants find food for themselves? It turns out that they have developed sensory organs that we do not possess. For example, they unmistakably sense heat from a long distance. The snake senses a human hand already at a distance of thirty centimeters. Therefore, it is quite easy for silently crawling snakes to find even those warm-blooded animals that are carefully hidden in shelters. So that their own breathing does not interfere with their breathing, some of them (for example, pythons) have nostrils facing upward and backward.
But the sense of smell is most developed in snakes. It is quite surprising that the organ of smell is located in their mouth, on the palate, and the necessary information is delivered to it by the tongue, which extracts various small particles from the air. So the snakes daylight is not needed, they can crawl in the footsteps of their prey with equal success both day and night.
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Once, not far from the Serengeti, my son Michael and I came across a huge hieroglyphic python, reaching three to four meters in length. We decided to take him with us. By the way, giant snakes, if they are not holding on to a tree or tangled in bushes, are not that difficult to catch. In an hour they can travel no more than one and a half kilometers - if they suddenly have the desire to crawl for an hour. Giant snakes move completely differently than their small relatives. They move forward, wriggling with their whole body, while in a giant snake the abdominal scales are used for this purpose. The scales are set in motion by muscles extending from the ribs (the ribs themselves remain motionless), causing it to move forward and backward like the small scoops of an excavator.
We didn't have yet great experience in handling snakes and therefore at first they showed extreme caution when guiding the python with spears. But in the end, we still decided to grab the snake by the tail, and it didn’t even try to attack us. We managed to stuff her into a bag, which we tied and put under a cot in our tent for the night. Unfortunately, the next morning the bag was empty. Huge snake Still managed to free myself. However, from the trail she left, it was easy to find out where she crawled. This trail was straight, distinct and wide, as if someone had rolled a car tire.
Not a single snake, including poisonous ones, is able to catch up with a running person. But giant snakes can swim well, much better than other land animals. As for the anaconda, it can be classified as an aquatic rather than a terrestrial animal.
Snakes and the sea don't care. Thus, one boa constrictor (Constrictor) was carried by the current 320 kilometers from the South American coast and washed up on the island of St. Vincent, where he arrived in good spirits.
When the Krakatoa volcano erupted in 1888, all life on the island of the same name was destroyed. Biologists observed how, over the subsequent years and decades, various lichens, plants and animals gradually reappeared here. So, the first reptiles to appear there were rock pythons, which by 1908 again took possession of the island.
The giant snakes have not yet completely turned into round ropes, as happened with other representatives of the snake tribe. Boas and pythons, like us, still have a pair of lungs, while in most other snakes the left lung has disappeared, and the right has greatly elongated and expanded noticeably. The giant snakes have small remains of pelvic and hip bones. But only two pitiful claws remained from the outside of the hind legs - to the right and to the left of the anus.
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How do such slow giants manage to catch their prey? From the very beginning it should be said that the statement that they knock a person or any animal unconscious with a blow to their head is absolutely false. The head of these giant monsters not particularly hard, and in any case softer than ours. The snake itself would not be too pleased to use it for boxing. In addition, the attack of a giant snake is by no means as lightning fast as it is imagined. The force with which a snake weighing 125 kilograms attacks a victim is no greater than the force with which a dog weighing 20 kilograms attacks. Of course, some frail, unathletic European might fall from such a push. But a more or less dexterous man is quite capable of handling a four-meter boa constrictor alone, at least if he manages to stay on his feet; he can pull down the snake coils entwined around him with a few energetic jerks.
For a snake, it is much more important not to hit its head, but to grab the victim with its teeth. To do this, she opens her mouth to the limit. The reticulated python has a hundred back-curved teeth arranged in six rows in its mouth. Therefore, if he managed to grab at least a finger, it is not so easy to pull it back. To do this, you need to try to unclench the snake’s jaws and first stick your hand even further into the mouth, and then pull it out.
Only when the snake has firmly grabbed the victim with its teeth does it begin to wrap its coils around it. Therefore, those who have to deal with giant snakes should always remember that they need to be grabbed only by the “scruff” - behind the head, so that they cannot bite.
Please take a closer look at the film footage or photographs that capture the “struggle” of a person with giant snake who allegedly strangles her victim. You will almost certainly notice that the “victim” has grabbed the snake by the throat. In such cases, the person himself wraps the snake around himself and then plays out the whole scene of a frantic struggle.
But even if the snake managed to grab its victim with its teeth and wrap it in several rings, this does not mean that it can “crush all its bones.” Giant snakes, even if they weigh more than a hundred kilograms, do not have the remarkable strength that is attributed to them. After all, the larger and heavier the animal, the less strength it has per kilogram of body weight. Thus, a louse, given its weight, is 10 thousand times stronger than an elephant. And smaller snakes can squeeze and strangle a suitable victim much more strongly than giant snakes can squeeze their own.
Giant snakes kill not by crushing bones, but by strangulation. They squeeze the chest of their victim so much that she is unable to breathe air into her lungs. It is possible that prolonged compression may paralyze the heart. Snake rings, coiled around the victim's torso, act more like a rubber gut or rubber bandage than like a strong rope. It is absolutely impossible to crush a hard bone in this way. Therefore, when some reports of snake attacks involve crushed human skulls, we can firmly say in advance that this is idle fiction. The human skull is a fairly hard nut to crack, and you can’t crack it with soft, elastic objects!
My colleague Dr. Gustav Lederer, who directed our exotarium for forty years, carefully examined three pigs, three rabbits and three rats that had been killed but not yet swallowed by giant snakes. No broken bones were found in the victims. But the already swallowed prey contained such bones.
Giant snakes are kept in many zoos around the world and generally do not show any aggression as long as they are left alone. They are even quite easy to tame. Pythons living in the wild, when they are attacked or want to be grabbed, defend themselves only by trying to bite, and the pythons never try to throw their rings on the enemy; they only do this with prey that they are going to swallow.
In zoos, there are sometimes circumstances in which force must be used against a snake (for example, when moving a newly arrived resident into a terrarium or when veterinary intervention is necessary). To hold the snake, people are placed in this way: for every linear meter of the snake there is one person who must hold his part tightly, under no circumstances letting go of it.
I've been asking everywhere about any case where a snake in a zoo killed someone, but until now I had never heard of it. True, I was told that in a Ruga animal sales company several decades ago, a seven- or eight-meter reticulated python wrapped itself around the senior servant Siegfried and “broke several of his ribs.”
One former dancer, who once performed dances with snakes, told the servants of our Frankfurt Zoo that one of the snakes once squeezed her so hard that she broke two ribs. But in order for a slender girl to break two ribs, no supernatural forces are required. For example, one day one of my sons, in a fit of tenderness, hugged his bride so tightly that something crunched inside her. It turned out that he broke her rib...
Although giant boas, as already mentioned, are quite easy to tame, nevertheless, the snakes with which dancers perform in various variety shows and circuses do not necessarily have to be tame. In order to wrap snakes around your shoulders and waist during a dance without any risk, it is enough to cool them down before the performance, then you can do almost anything with them. These cold-blooded animals become active only after they have warmed up thoroughly.
Of course, dragging snakes around tours, especially in winter, keeping them in poorly heated stage restrooms or hotel rooms does not do them any good. They do not survive such a life for long and die. Therefore, dancers have to frequently renew their supply of pythons.
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It is not true that giant snakes have the habit of hanging from a tree with the end of their tail holding a branch and thus catching their prey. The statement that they pre-wet the dead animal with their saliva to facilitate swallowing is also incorrect. This misconception is based on the fact that snakes are often forced to regurgitate swallowed prey. This happens for various reasons: either the victim turns out to be prohibitively large, or when swallowed it occupies an awkward position, or it has horns that prevent its movement along the esophagus; and sometimes someone simply scared the snake, and this prevented it from calmly dealing with its prey. Of course, a burped animal is abundantly moistened with saliva, which led people who accidentally saw it to misinterpret it.
Even very large and heavy snakes are able to crawl into relatively small loopholes, narrow windows or cracks in a fence. In this way, they usually sneak into chicken coops, pigsties or barns where goats are kept. And when they, having swallowed their victim whole, try to crawl back into the same hole from which they came, a huge thickening on the body does not allow them to get out, and they find themselves trapped. This is where, it would seem, you can use your ability to regurgitate swallowed prey to free yourself from captivity! But snakes, as it turned out, “don’t have enough intelligence” for this.
Similar cases have been described quite often.
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Of course, the most striking thing is the snake with a huge thickening on its body, which means that it has only recently swallowed some large animal. They always willingly photograph it from all sides, and this is quite easy to do, because in this position the snake becomes clumsy and helpless. When an anaconda has several swallowed fish in its stomach, or a young python has several frogs, rodents or birds in its stomach, then no one pays attention to them.
This is what led to the misconception that giant snakes exist due to much more large production than in reality. To be honest, they are surprisingly modest eaters, these snakes, and, oddly enough, they can “fast” for a long time.
The largest victims of snakes include antelopes the size of an average roe deer or pigs, and not our large European pigs, but wild boars or small domestic pigs of hot countries. So, when it comes to the fact that large antelopes such as kudu, topi, waterbuck and eland can become victims of snakes, we must always keep in mind that these can only be young animals, and not adult animals.
In Uganda, the Toro Reserve in the Semliki Valley is home to approximately 12 thousand Ugandan swamp goats. These goats appear to be the main prey of hieroglyphic pythons. In any case, during the year we came across swamp goats killed by pythons at least five times. And each time the victims turned out to be immature females. A more thorough examination revealed that their bones were not broken, and death, most likely, was due to suffocation.
Sometimes vultures try to grab some of the snake's prey for themselves. In such cases, the python hisses loudly and makes throws towards the impudent people, trying to drive them away. However, the python never manages to grab the vulture, but the vultures, as a rule, manage to tear out large pieces of meat from the snake’s victim.
Such a case has been reported. A python 4.5 meters long and weighing 54 kilograms caught a small female Ugandan swamp goat weighing 30 kilograms and began to swallow her: the victim’s head and neck had already disappeared into the snake’s mouth. The snake's body was wrapped in rings around its prey. When keepers P. Hay and P. Martin approached the python, at first it did not even move. When one of those who approached began to pull out bushes of grass around the snake’s head to make it easier to photograph, the python hissed and immediately released the victim from its mouth. But he did not make the slightest attempt to drive the people away and did not even loosen the rings around the prey.
And in Zambia, at the Kariba reservoir, they observed how one hieroglyphic python grabbed the neck of an adult Nile monitor lizard with its teeth and wrapped itself three times around the lizard’s body. This monitor lizard was 1 meter and 53 centimeters long, while the python was 2 meters 40 centimeters. Varan died shortly after his release, and no damage was noticeable on the python’s body after the struggle.
Another time, a python 2 meters 10 centimeters long was seen lying on a tree, tightly wrapping its rings around the monitor lizard it had killed (messages by X. Roth).
It is known that one snake can swallow another, even one of equal size, because the swallowed individual is strongly compressed. Thus, in the Transvaal (South Africa) they observed how a small python strangled a large black mamba. At first the Mamba resisted furiously, but after a two-hour struggle it calmed down and remained lying on the grass like a lifeless rope.
By the way, many species of snakes “specialized” in feeding on their own kind - other species of snakes. However, we have never encountered “cannibals” among them: they do not kill relatives of their own species.
But somehow even a leopard was found in the stomach of a five-meter python! In the fight against a snake, this dexterous and strong predator was able to inflict only the most minor injuries on her. True, the report on this case did not indicate whether it was an adult leopard or not. For example, in our Frankfurt Zoo, a seven- or eight-meter Indian reticulated python is not able to swallow a victim weighing more than 55 kilograms. An Indian python measuring 7.5 meters once swallowed a domestic pig weighing 54 kilograms, and another time an Indian long-eared goat weighing 47.5 kilograms.
In both cases, the greatest difficulty was caused to the snake not by killing the victim, but by swallowing it. Two days later, after the snake swallowed the pig, it was still so swollen that it resembled a rubber hose inflated with air, swollen in one place. We were even afraid that the animal might be seriously injured.
The remaining large reticulated pythons kept in the Frankfurt Zoo over the past decades, as a rule, refused large prey. True, it happened that they grabbed a victim weighing 30 kilograms or more and killed it, but in most cases they were unable to swallow it.
Dr. Lederer recorded that the seven-meter, extremely voracious python, after a whole hour of intense effort, failed to swallow a goat weighing 34 kilograms. Another 7.7-meter python suffered in vain with a pig weighing 43 kilograms and was unable to swallow it.
In short, no expert has ever claimed that a giant snake is able to swallow a victim whose weight exceeds 60 kilograms.
If the snake takes a little time to grab and kill the victim, then the predator is in no hurry to swallow the killed animal. She lowers the victim to the ground, sniffs it carefully, and only after that begins to pull herself over it, like a stocking. Most often she starts from the head. At the same time, she pauses, sometimes for a full quarter of an hour, and rests. It is known that snakes are able to release both the upper and lower jaws from the joint, and then they are held on only by ligaments. This method allows you to open your mouth extremely wide. The snake bites into its prey with several rows of backward-curved teeth, and then its jaws (alternately lower and upper) move forward some distance. The larynx also protrudes forward so that the snake can breathe and not suffocate. The snake is so elastic only up to the stomach; all other insides are no longer stretchable. Therefore, the food that enters there must already be completely dissolved by gastric juice.
Despite the fact that pythons and boas can swallow huge pieces in one go, they still cannot be considered voracious. In one meal they receive 400 times more energy than they need per day. But then (sometimes out of necessity, or even out of mood) they may not eat for quite a long time.
So, in Frankfurt, one reticulated python fasted for 570 days, then ate for a while, and then “fasted” again for 415 days. And the gabune viper (a venomous and smaller snake from Africa) refused food for 679 days, that is, for almost two years. An Indian tiger python went 149 days without eating anything and lost only 10 percent of its weight.
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From all of the above, we can already conclude that pythons are not able to kill, much less swallow, a person. In zoos, over time, even a kind of friendly or, at least, trusting relationship is established between the giant snakes and the servants of the terrarium. The giant gets used to the fact that the attendant walks back and forth past him while cleaning his premises, and he does not make any aggressive attacks. However, some snakes (with a bad “character”) remain biters until the end of their days. Every sudden gesture, even a quick movement of a person's eyes, can prompt them to attack. If a snake manages to grab a living body with its teeth, it certainly tries to wrap itself around it. If she grabs loosely hanging material - the hem of a coat or the edge of a sweater - she does not make such attempts. We were able to observe this in a good half-dozen cases. A person experienced in such matters can easily handle a healthy python with a length of 3 to 4.5 meters. However, snakes reaching six meters or more can be very dangerous to humans. Nevertheless, there are still no known reliable cases of a free-living giant snake killing, much less swallowing, an adult. It should be taken into account that in certain areas of the globe, especially in East Asia, snakes often live very close to human habitation. As rat exterminators, they even enjoy a certain sympathy from village residents. While such a snake is young, it does not pose the slightest danger to either people or domestic animals.
Recently in one African scientific journal some farmer reported about a four-year-old child who went down to the river every day, carrying a bowl of milk or porridge, explaining that he was going to play with Nana. One day the father decided to see who his son was going to feed, and, to his horror, he saw that it was a huge python. He immediately killed the snake. But since pythons do not eat either porridge or milk, everything in this story seems very implausible to me. The fact that snakes supposedly drink milk and even milk cows is an absurd, but completely ineradicable belief.
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In the Napo River in Ecuador, a huge anaconda grabbed a swimmer, pulled him under the water and drowned him, but did not swallow him. The story is told of a thirteen-year-old boy who was also drowned by a snake; she swallowed it, but then regurgitated it again. The child’s father found the snake a day and a half later and killed it. This incident also occurred in one of the tributaries of the Napo River.
Another reliable story describes how a reticulated python swallowed a fourteen-year-old Malayan boy from the island of Salsbabu. One veterinarian from India, who visited the Frankfurt Zoo in the 1920s, told us something similar. He even showed photographs confirming the documentation of this story.
But how truly rare these cases are can only be understood when you imagine how many such large snakes live on the globe (or lived, at least until very recently). This can be judged at least by the number of snake skins produced. By the way, the skin of a snake is by no means slippery and sticky, as many people imagine who have an irresistible disgust for snakes; it feels pleasantly cool and completely dry, as if you were holding a wallet in your hands. Swimming through the water and crawling through the mud, the snake always remains dry and clean. She crawls on her stomach along the rocks, but does not damage her skin at all.
Since tanners learned to process even the most unusual leathers, the demand for snakes on the world market has greatly increased. A wide variety of fashionable toiletries and haberdashery items are made from snakeskin. True, no one has yet managed to preserve the beautiful colored pattern of the skin of a living snake on these products.
Trade catalogs in most countries usually indicate “reptile skins,” which include, in addition to snake skins, alligator skins, crocodiles, large lizards and other similar animals. The United States purchased no less than 8 million such reptile skins in 1951, Great Britain - even 12 million. About half of these skins are snake skins, and they belong to the largest and, therefore, almost exclusively harmless, and not poisonous, snakes.
In total, at least 12 million snakeskins are sold annually. If a belt were made from all of them, it could encircle the entire globe along the equator.
Considering that there are an incredible number of snakes in the warm regions of our planet, there is every reason to consider the rarest deaths associated with attacks by these reptiles, as an exception. In any case, we people can rest assured: we are not on the snake menu.
But the opposite, by the way, cannot be said: many people eat snakes with pleasure. For example, Madame de Sevigny wrote in her notes at the end of the 17th century that it was eating vipers that so amazingly refreshes and cleanses her blood and miraculously rejuvenates the body.
Most snakes are eaten in China. However, in the United States they can also rattlesnakes, and their fresh meat is sold as a special delicacy. Henry Raven, who was hunting in Kalimantan, told how the Dayaks accompanying him during the hunt with great delight grabbed a python that was just about to escape into the water. They found two swallowed pigs in the snake’s stomach, so “the hunters threw a feast, during which they even served pork.”
In Africa, snake meat is also eaten, mainly from the hieroglyphic python.
* * *
It happens that vultures also deal with pythons. Forester J. Shenton witnessed how, not far from Ngoma, on a bare, scorched, and therefore shelterless plain, eight vultures attacked one python. They surrounded the snake on all sides, alternately jumped up to it, pecked and quickly jumped back, while the snake made mad dashes in all directions. The python was seriously wounded: in several places entire pieces of meat were torn out of its body, and through the gaping wounds ribs and entrails were visible, even one eye was pecked out. The forester finished off the unfortunate animal. Having carefully examined it, he was convinced that it was a completely healthy snake, on whose body there were no old wounds.
In South Africa, in the Johannesburg area, on a highway near Mahadodorp, a car accident with human casualties occurred due to the fault of a python.
And it was like this. From under the front fender of the car in which the husband and wife were traveling, a big snake and went straight to the woman. The husband, trying to save his wife from being bitten, let go of the steering wheel, and the car slid to the side of the road, crushing a local resident to death. In the general confusion, while they were busy with the dead man and the police were drawing up a report, the snake safely disappeared under the body of the car, where it hid in the draft mechanism. Since it could not be shot, the car had to be towed to the Transvaal Snake Nursery, which is located in Halfway House. The owner of the nursery and his assistants fiddled for three whole hours until they finally managed to pull the snake, which reached a length of 1.8 meters, out of the car. She remained safe and sound.
* * *
Once in the Serengeti, a leopard caught a fairly large python more than three meters long. He sat with his prey in a tree, but every time tourists and photographers came to this place, disturbing him during his meal, he climbed down from the tree with a snake in his teeth and hid in tall grass. When the car drove away, he climbed up the tree again.
* * *
Boa constrictors give birth to live young. This means that the eggs are retained in the mother’s body and the female, as it were, “incubates” them in herself until the moment when the cubs “reach condition” and are ready for independent existence. This method of producing offspring is observed in a number of fish and reptiles.
A 5.3-meter female anaconda gave birth to 34 cubs, each 70 centimeters long, in the zoological garden.
Pythons lay eggs - sometimes 20 pieces, or even 70; At Frankfurt Zoo, our pythons have an average of 46 eggs. Freshly laid, they are white, soft, shiny and sticky. But after a few minutes, the shine of the eggs disappears, and they stick together, which, of course, significantly reduces their total surface and helps slow down evaporation. After a few hours, the egg skin hardens and becomes parchment-like. Eggs require heat and moisture to mature; if they even at the most a short time fell into the water - everything was lost.
Pythons “incubate” their eggs in a very real way. They lay themselves in rings around the masonry, as if wrapping it, and place their heads on top, as if on a pillow.
Already in 1841, at the Paris Zoo, it was noticed that these cold-blooded animals still managed to warm their eggs. At the Washington Zoo, very recently, using very accurate thermometers, it was possible to establish that the body temperature of a brooding female hieroglyphic python rises by three to four degrees - exactly the same number of degrees that males are colder than females. If you insert a thermometer between the tightly pressed rings of a brooding snake, you will often find that the difference in temperature between the snake’s body and the surrounding air exceeds seven degrees. In this position - wrapped around her clutch - the female remains lying for about 80 days, while she does not eat at all.
* * *
Young pythons molt in our zoo from five to nine times a year, adults - from three to seven times. The snake's skin begins to peel off its head. Thin and transparent, it can be pulled off the snake's body like a stocking.
If our skin, as humans, did not come off gradually, in the form of tiny scales and dandruff, but entirely, as happens with snakes, we would certainly arrange this process as solemnly as possible, surrounding it with all sorts of ritual sacraments and beliefs. And, of course, on radio and television every night they would listen to dozens of tips on what ointments and rubbings can be used to speed up shedding and make the newly born young skin brighter and more beautiful.
However, snakes are sometimes not averse to using outside help during molting. Thus, in the Transvaal, a certain J. Marais noticed how several grazing cows were diligently licking something on the ground. As he got closer, he saw that it was a huge molting python. The snake lay stretched out, and the cows licked its skin. Noticing the approach of a person, the python immediately crawled into hiding.
* * *
Having reached the age of five or six, male giant snakes go in search of brides. Moreover, they crawl in the footsteps of females. They, in all likelihood, determine that these are traces of females by the smell secreted by special odorous glands located in their anus. When such a couple meets, they raise their heads towards each other, feel the partner with their tongue, and only then mate. Mating in the zoo usually lasts up to two and a half hours.
* * *
Not a single fact speaks of
Original taken from irnella V
I kept thinking that a boa constrictor (or some other snake) CANNOT SWALLOW a person purely by physiological reasons. All films about this are fiction and horror films. But what does it turn out to be? Here's yesterday's news.
In Russia, a drunk can freeze, but it turned out that in hot India it is also dangerous to get completely drunk. A man lying in the cold on the street near a store in the Indian state of Kerala was devoured by a huge man-eating python.
A snake that swallowed a man. Photo: India, Kerala state.
The incident happened in the Indian state of Kerala, which, like Goa, attracts a large number of tourists.
In India, a careless man decided to have a pleasant evening, but did not bring any alcohol home and drank the purchased drinks right next to a liquor store. The drunkard settled down there for the night.
And in the morning local residents They found a bloated snake on the threshold of a shop. It turned out that the python was crawling past the liquor store and saw the “food”. He strangled the man and then swallowed his victim. After such a hearty “lunch,” the reptile was unable to crawl away and lay down at the scene of the emergency.
The bloated snake was subsequently discovered by local residents, LOTD reports.
This example can serve as an edification to numerous tourists who go to India on vacation and often forget about moderation in relation to alcohol and other relaxing substances.
Here's a case like this:
A huge python, according to the children's stories, suddenly grabbed their friend when they were collecting fallen mangoes in the garden. The snake quickly wrapped itself around the child, tightly squeezing his arms and legs. The boy was so scared that he didn’t even scream or cry.
“The python squeezed him more and more until the boy closed his eyes and threw his head back,” said 11-year-old Cave, an eyewitness to the tragedy. “I realized that he was dead or unconscious. Then the snake opened its mouth wide and began to swallow him all at once, starting with the head.” For three hours, the children silently watched what was happening, afraid to move or call for help.
Later, police and snake experts found no traces of the tragedy - the child and his clothes disappeared along with the snake. On the rumpled grass there was only a trail leading to the spring. Herpentologists explained that the African python needed water to better digest its prey.
According to experts, this is the first case of cannibalism for this species of snake. Python apparently woke up after hibernation and was very hungry.
Bloated from human body The reptile was found nearby in the jungle; it could not crawl far. The snake was killed and immediately cut up, but the boy could not be saved - he died of suffocation.
Another case:
It turns out that the plot of the film “Anaconda” has a real basis and in our sinful world there are giant reptiles that can swallow a person whole.
Typically, snakes prefer to attack smaller creatures that they can easily swallow, but despite this, there are many documented cases of these reptiles swallowing livestock, dogs and even baby hippos.
Unfortunately, the diet of these predators is not limited to such a meager set of dishes, and creeping reptiles are not averse to tasting human flesh if possible. It’s hard to believe, but there really are giant giants on Earth for whom humans are just prey.
Four friends: Jose Ronaldo. Fernando Contaro, Miguel Orvaro and Sebastian Forte went to Mato Grosso, Brazil for camping and fishing. The fishing went well, and the alcohol flowed freely. Returning from the river, the friends noticed the absence of the fourth member of their fun company- dentist Jose Ronaldo. The tipsy fishermen looked for their drinking buddy before dark, but Jose seemed to have disappeared into the ground.
The next day, in a cheerful and high spirits, they went in search, hoping to find their friend lying drunk in some ditch. Towards evening they discovered his torn clothes.
“At first we decided that it was a robbery: the ground around was dug up, as if someone had been fighting on it,” says one of the fishermen, Fernando Contaro. “My heart was relieved, because if he was attacked by a person, and not a wild animal, then he could survive!”
After examining the scene of the struggle, they discovered a deep footprint in the ground leading into the forest. Experienced Hunter Sebastian Forte immediately said that a snake had left him... a very large snake, at least 10 meters long. The sun was already setting and the men decided to return to camp.
The next morning the men followed the snake's trail. What they discovered at the end of their journey shocked them: lying in front of them was a giant anaconda with an incredibly bloated body. Miguel pressed the python's head to the ground with a stick, and Fernando shot the reptile twice in the head with a revolver. The anaconda was towed to the camp, where they cut open its stomach and removed the dentist’s body, which had already begun to digest.
If a snake swallows a person, which happens relatively rarely, then it is certainly only for the purpose of “eating a little.” Here we could quote lengthy instructions recently published on the Internet on what to do if you are swallowed by a python or anaconda. The basic idea is that you need to let the snake swallow more of its legs, and then, with a sharp movement of a sharp knife, cut its head from the side from the inside. Where to get a sharp knife and what to do if you start to be swallowed from the head - this instruction does not tell you.
The only difficulty when swallowing a person should be caused by the shoulders. An adult, broad-shouldered man can hardly be swallowed...
The snake's jaw can, of course, move apart, but only to a certain limit. Only possible way- if the snake manages to swallow a person lying on its side (or it itself turns its head in such a way so that the victim enters it sideways).
So an anaconda may well swallow a child, a woman, a small, narrow-shouldered man...
Case three. Why shouldn't snakes eat hippos?
The answer is simple, hippos have too thick skin that more than one snake simply cannot digest.
(It's an unpleasant sight, think twice before watching)
Video: a stupid python that ate a baby hippopotamus, crawled with this carcass for a week, became terribly hungry and was forced to vomit this delicacy out of itself.
Here is a very recent case in March of this year:
A seven-meter python swallowed an adult man.
On the island of Sulawesi, which belongs to Indonesia, a giant python swallowed an adult man whole, reports the Daily Mail.
According to the publication, 25-year-old Akbar Salubiro disappeared on Sunday, March 26. On this day, he was going to a neighboring village to collect palm oil.
The next evening, fellow villagers concerned about his disappearance began a search and found a seven-meter bloated python in the backyard of the man’s house. They decided to autopsy the reptile and found Salubiro's body.
Village council spokesman Salubiro Junaidi said that the night before the snake was discovered, people heard screams coming from the palm grove. He did not specify why no one came to the call.
And now just some interesting information about snakes on this topic.
Bernard Grzimek.
From the book “Animals are my life.”
Can a snake swallow a person?
“There is no doubt that the ancients meant by their dragons our modern giant snakes. The amazing size of these animals, their considerable strength and the general fear of snakes in general make the exaggerations of which the ancients were guilty very clear.<…>Over time, human imagination has endowed dragons even richer and from incomprehensible fairy tales oriental people images gradually grew for which man of sense I searched in vain for the originals, because information about the giant snakes themselves was almost lost. The more stubbornly uneducated people stuck to the favorite description of a large dragon or a gorynych serpent, spewed onto the earth for the destruction of the whole world "(A. E. Bram)
A giant twenty-meter or even thirty-meter snake, hiding on a branch, lies in wait for its prey. From a blow to the crown of her head, hard as a stone, a man taken by surprise falls almost unconscious to the ground, and the snake, with a lightning-fast throw, rushes at him and wraps him in its coils, breaking all his bones in an iron embrace. This happens in cases where brave liberators who cut the snake into pieces with knives do not arrive in time to help...
Descriptions of such heartbreaking scenes can be found in many adventure novels and even in other reports of expeditions to the unexplored tropics.
Do giant snakes really attack humans? Are they capable of swallowing us? There are hardly any other animals that are fantasized about as much as pythons, anacondas or boa constrictors. And therefore, it is precisely with regard to these animals that even a specialist finds it very difficult in each individual case to decide what is true and what is fiction.
This starts with determining the length. Even serious travelers have claimed that anacondas 30 or even 40 meters long are found in the Amazon forests. But they, as a rule, kept silent about whether they measured these snakes themselves or know this from eyewitness accounts.
Anaconda is the same boa constrictor, only South American. It is she who is considered the largest and strongest among all the giant snakes in the world. Another South American snake, also no less famous and also a boa constrictor (Constrictor), reaches a length of “only” five to six meters.
It must be said that measuring a snake is not so easy. It is most convenient to do this, of course, when it stretches to its full length. But for a large snake such a position is completely unnatural; some of them are simply not able to accept it - they need to bend at least the very end of their tail to the side in order to have support. Such a strong animal will not voluntarily allow itself to be straightened for measurement. In a dead snake, the body usually becomes so ossified that it is even more difficult to measure. If you judge the length of snakes by their skins that go on sale, then it is very easy to fall into a mistake: after all, this skin is sold by the meter, and therefore, while it is fresh, it can be stretched in length by 20 percent, and some say even by all 50. Snake hunters often use this.
It is interesting that live snakes are also sold by the meter. Snake traders charge zoos for small and medium-sized pythons from 80 pfennig to one mark for every centimeter. The New York Zoological Society announced many years ago that it would pay 20 thousand marks to anyone who brought a live anaconda over ten meters long; however, no one has yet been able to earn this tempting amount.
And yet it is quite possible that such giants exist or existed until very recently. The weight of such an animal should be quite impressive; Thus, the Asian reticulated python measures 8.8 meters and weighs 115 kilograms. It’s no wonder that such a colossus, living in the thicket of a virgin forest, is not so easy to defeat without a whole horde of helpers. And then you still need to be able to deliver it unharmed to the airfield or port.
The record length of the hieroglyphic python (Python sebae), widespread in Africa, is 9.8 meters. The Indian or tiger python (Python molurus) reaches 6.6 meters, the East Asian reticulated python (Python reticulatus) - either 8.4 meters or 10 meters, depending on which source you believe. A little smaller than the amethyst python.
So, in fact, we have already listed all six giants of the snake world: four oviparous pythons - natives of the Old World and two viviparous boas - of the New. Among the 2,500 species of snakes that inhabit the globe, there are a number of other species of boas and pythons, but they are much smaller.
Giant snakes are not poisonous. Unlike the fat giants of the snake kingdom, poisonous snakes (for example, the African mamba, sometimes reaching four meters, and the even longer king cobra) are thinner and slimmer.
It takes a snake a lot of time to reach its enormous size. The eight-meter reticulated python living at the Pittsburgh Zoo grew by only 25 centimeters in a year. The older a snake gets, the slower it grows.
It is completely impossible to determine from the appearance of a snake whether it is a female or a male. A pair of hieroglyphic pythons, which arrived at the New York Zoo at the age of one, grew at the same rate for the first six to seven years, but then the female began to noticeably lag in growth. The fact is that during this time she began to fast every year for six months: during the maturation of the eggs and when she warmed them, curled up around them.
We don’t know to what age giant snakes can live in the wild. No one has ever ringed them in their habitats, as has been done for decades, for example, with migratory birds. We can judge their age only from data obtained from zoos. The anaconda lived the longest at the Washington Zoo - 28 years (from 1899 to 1927). One of the boas lived in England at the Bristol Zoo for 23 years and 3 months, and the hieroglyphic python reached the age of eighteen there. A tiger python at the San Diego Zoo (California) lived to be 22 years and 9 months, and two East Asian reticulated pythons - one in London and the other in Paris - died at the age of 21.
The giants of the snake kingdom are the only large animals on Earth that do not have a voice, like, in fact, all other snakes. At best they can hiss. Snakes are not only mute, but also deaf. They do not perceive sound vibrations in the air - they do not have ears for this, like other animals. But they perfectly perceive any, even the most insignificant, shaking of the soil or litter on which they rest.
In addition, these deaf-mute giants also have poor vision. Their eyes are devoid of movable eyelids, and the transparent leathery film that protects the eye during each molt is separated along with all the skin and removed, like glass from a watch. The snake eye lacks the muscles of the iris, therefore the pupil cannot contract in bright light and dilate in dim light. The snake barely reacts to changes in the lighting of the eyes: the lens in it cannot bend, like ours, which deprives snakes of the opportunity to carefully examine objects located at close or far distances at will. To look at anything, the snake has to move its entire head first and then back. Perhaps all these are very useful properties (necessary, for example, for swimming and especially for looking at various objects under water), but, by God, much more improved eyes are found in the animal world.
Since the python, like other snakes, does not close its eyes during sleep, it is always very difficult to determine whether it is sleeping or awake. Some snake researchers argue that a sleeping snake faces downwards, meaning its pupil is at the bottom edge of the eye; others dispute this claim.
The immobility of snake eyes gave rise to the widely repeated fairy tale that snakes supposedly hypnotize, as if paralyzing their prey with their gaze. Frogs, lizards or small rodents do sometimes sit completely motionless in the presence of a giant boa constrictor, but this is explained by different reasons: sometimes they simply do not notice the danger, and sometimes they become numb with fear; such freezing brings them a certain benefit, since the snake does not distinguish a motionless victim. After all, it is only when the frog runs away that the snake overtakes it.
How, after all, do these deaf-mute and, moreover, short-sighted giants find food for themselves? It turns out that they have developed sensory organs that we do not possess. For example, they unmistakably sense heat from a long distance. The snake senses a human hand already at a distance of thirty centimeters. Therefore, it is quite easy for silently crawling snakes to find even those warm-blooded animals that are carefully hidden in shelters. So that their own breathing does not interfere with their breathing, some of them (for example, pythons) have nostrils facing upward and backward.
But the sense of smell is most developed in snakes. It is quite surprising that the organ of smell is located in their mouth, on the palate, and the necessary information is delivered to it by the tongue, which extracts various small particles from the air. Thus, snakes do not need daylight; they can crawl in the tracks of their prey with equal success both day and night.
Once, not far from the Serengeti, my son Michael and I came across a huge hieroglyphic python, reaching three to four meters in length. We decided to take him with us. By the way, giant snakes, if they are not holding on to a tree or tangled in bushes, are not that difficult to catch. In an hour they can travel no more than one and a half kilometers - if they suddenly have the desire to crawl for an hour. Giant snakes move completely differently than their small relatives. They move forward, wriggling with their whole body, while in a giant snake the abdominal scales are used for this purpose. The scales are set in motion by muscles extending from the ribs (the ribs themselves remain motionless), causing it to move forward and backward like the small scoops of an excavator.
At that time we did not yet have much experience in handling snakes and therefore at first we showed extreme caution when guiding the python with spears. But in the end, we still decided to grab the snake by the tail, and it didn’t even try to attack us. We managed to stuff her into a bag, which we tied and put under a cot in our tent for the night. Unfortunately, the next morning the bag was empty. The huge snake still managed to free itself. However, from the trail she left, it was easy to find out where she crawled. This trail was straight, distinct and wide, as if someone had rolled a car tire.
Not a single snake, including poisonous ones, is able to catch up with a running person. But giant snakes can swim well, much better than other land animals. As for the anaconda, it can be classified as an aquatic rather than a terrestrial animal.
Snakes and the sea don't care. Thus, one boa constrictor (Constriktor) was carried by the current 320 kilometers from the South American coast and washed up on the island of St. Vincent, where he arrived in good spirits.
When the Krakatoa volcano erupted in 1888, all life on the island of the same name was destroyed. Biologists observed how, over the subsequent years and decades, various lichens, plants and animals gradually reappeared here. So, the first reptiles to appear there were rock pythons, which by 1908 again took possession of the island.
The giant snakes have not yet completely turned into round ropes, as happened with other representatives of the snake tribe. Boas and pythons, like us, still have a pair of lungs, while in most other snakes the left lung has disappeared, and the right has greatly elongated and expanded noticeably. The giant snakes have small remains of pelvic and hip bones. But only two pitiful claws remained from the outside of the hind legs - to the right and to the left of the anus.
How do such slow giants manage to catch their prey? It should be said from the very beginning that the statement that they knock a person or any animal unconscious with a blow to their head is absolutely false. The heads of these giant monsters are not particularly hard, and in any case softer than ours. The snake itself would not be too pleased to use it for boxing. In addition, the attack of a giant snake is by no means as lightning fast as it is imagined. The force with which a snake weighing 125 kilograms attacks a victim is no greater than the force with which a dog weighing 20 kilograms attacks. Of course, some frail, unathletic European might fall from such a push. But a more or less dexterous man is quite capable of handling a four-meter boa constrictor alone, at least if he manages to stay on his feet; he can pull down the snake coils entwined around him with a few energetic jerks.
For a snake, it is much more important not to hit its head, but to grab the victim with its teeth. To do this, she opens her mouth to the limit. The reticulated python has a hundred back-curved teeth arranged in six rows in its mouth. Therefore, if he managed to grab at least a finger, it is not so easy to pull it back. To do this, you need to try to unclench the snake’s jaws and first stick your hand even further into the mouth, and then pull it out.
Only when the snake has firmly grabbed the victim with its teeth does it begin to wrap its coils around it. Therefore, those who have to deal with giant snakes should always remember to grab them only by the “scruff” - behind the head, so that they cannot bite.
Please take a closer look at the film footage or photographs depicting the “struggle” of a man with a giant snake, which is supposedly strangling its victim. You will almost certainly notice that the “victim” has grabbed the snake by the throat. In such cases, the person himself wraps the snake around himself and then plays out the whole scene of a frantic struggle.
But even if the snake managed to grab its victim with its teeth and wrap it in several rings, this does not mean that it can “crush all its bones.” Giant snakes, even if they weigh more than a hundred kilograms, do not at all have the remarkable strength that is attributed to them. After all, the larger and heavier the animal, the less strength it has per kilogram of body weight. Thus, a louse, given its weight, is 10 thousand times stronger than an elephant. And smaller snakes can squeeze and strangle a suitable victim much more strongly than giant snakes can squeeze their own.
Giant snakes kill not by crushing bones, but by strangulation. They squeeze the chest of their victim so much that she is unable to breathe air into her lungs. It is possible that prolonged compression may paralyze the heart. Snake rings, coiled around the victim's torso, act more like a rubber gut or rubber bandage than a strong<анат. Раздавить таким способом твердый костяк абсолютно невозможно. Поэтому когда в некоторых сообщениях о нападении змей фигурируют раздавленные человеческие черепа, то заранее можно твердо сказать, что это досужий вымысел. Человеческий череп достаточно твердый орешек, и мягкими, эластичными предметами его не расколешь!
My colleague Dr. Gustav Lederer, who directed our exotarium for forty years, carefully examined three pigs, three rabbits and three rats that had been killed but not yet swallowed by giant snakes. No broken bones were found in the victims. But in the already swallowed prey there were broken bones.
Giant snakes are kept in many zoos around the world and generally do not show any aggression as long as they are left alone. They are even quite easy to tame. Pythons living in the wild, when they are attacked or want to be grabbed, defend themselves only by trying to bite, and almost never try to throw their rings at the enemy; they do this only with prey that they are going to swallow.
In zoos, there are sometimes circumstances in which force must be used against a snake (for example, when moving a newly arrived resident into a terrarium or when veterinary intervention is necessary). To hold the snake, people are placed in this way: for every linear meter of the snake there is one person who must hold his part tightly, under no circumstances letting go of it.
I've been asking everywhere about any case where a snake in a zoo killed someone, but until now I had never heard of it. True, I was told that in a Russian animal sales company several decades ago, a seven- or eight-meter reticulated python wrapped itself around the senior servant Siegfried and “broke several of his ribs.”
One former dancer, who once performed dances with snakes, told the servants of our Frankfurt Zoo that one of the snakes once squeezed her so hard that she broke two ribs. But in order for a slender girl to break two ribs, no supernatural forces are required. For example, one day one of my sons, in a fit, hugged his bride so tenderly that something crunched inside her. It turned out that he broke her rib...
Although giant boas, as already mentioned, can rarely be tamed, nevertheless, the snakes with which dancers perform in various variety shows and circuses do not necessarily have to be tame. In order to wrap snakes around your shoulders and waist during a dance without any risk, it is enough to cool them down before the performance, then you can do almost anything with them. These cold-blooded animals become active only after they have warmed up thoroughly.
Of course, dragging snakes around on tour, especially in winter, or keeping them in poorly heated stage restrooms or hotel rooms does not do them any good.
They do not survive such a life for long and die. Therefore, dancers have to frequently renew their supply of pythons.
It is not true that giant snakes have the habit of hanging from a tree with the end of their tail holding a branch and thus catching their prey. The statement that they pre-wet the dead animal with their saliva to facilitate swallowing is also incorrect. This misconception is based on the fact that snakes are often forced to regurgitate swallowed prey. This happens for various reasons: either the prey turns out to be prohibitively large, or when swallowed it takes an awkward position, or it has horns that prevent it from moving along the esophagus, and sometimes someone simply scared the snake, and this prevented it from calmly coping with the prey. Of course, a burped animal is abundantly moistened with saliva, which led people who accidentally saw it to misinterpret it.
Even very large and heavy snakes are able to crawl into relatively small loopholes, narrow windows or cracks in a fence. In this way, they usually sneak into chicken coops, pigsties or barns where goats are kept. And so, when they, having swallowed their victim whole, try to crawl back into the same hole from which they came, a huge thickening on the body does not allow them to get out, and they find themselves trapped. Here, it would seem, use your ability to regurgitate swallowed prey to free yourself from captivity! But snakes, as it turned out, “don’t have enough intelligence” for this.
Similar cases have been described quite often.
Original taken from masterok
V
Currently, several million snakes live on Earth. They live on every continent except Antarctica and generally within most bodies of water on the planet. They all have varying levels of aggression, gluttony and hostility towards people.
Although some of these deadly reptiles can kill a person in a matter of seconds, the most painful attacks occur when the snakes do not have any venom at all, killing their prey by strangulation. By digging their sharp, inwardly curved teeth into the victim's body, and then writhing and wrapping their massive bodies around them, they undoubtedly achieve a slow and painful death.
Over the decades, countless attacks on humans have been reported from anacondas, pythons, and common boa constrictors. Many have come face to face with these dangerous reptiles in the jungle, in cities, and sometimes even in their own homes.
Video. Crazy man among huge pythons.
This is expert Jay Brewer, who climbed up to three large pythons ahead of New Year's Eve 2015 to share a video about the animals he raised himself. But he also noted that it is truly unsafe.
Below are ten of the most shocking large snake attacks on people around the world.
1. Canadian boys killed while sleeping
In 2013, in the town of Campbellton, New Brunswick, there was a terrifying attack by a hieroglyphic python or rock python (lat. Python sebae). This special breed of snake can weigh up to 80 kg, reach lengths of up to 6 meters and easily kill its prey by strangulation.
This tragic incident involved two little boys who were clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time. They stayed overnight in the apartment of a family friend, who in the same apartment had a peculiar complex in the form of an exotic pet store.
Photo. Boys strangled by a snake
The report said the boys' cause of death was strangulation and an escaped python was identified as their killer.
On the night of this incident, a large snake remained in an enclosure not too far from where the four- and six-year-old victims were sleeping. It was clear how the uncovered python escaped from its cage, since there was a gap at the top due to the fact that the owner had not tightly closed the snake in the cage.
The python was able to slide up the ventilation system, which soon collapsed under the weight of the reptile. Nothing prevented Python from reaching the living room, where he came across two defenseless sleeping boys.
Photo. The same python
As a result, the reason why the python killed the children was never determined, leaving many perplexed. Because of this event, many questions and some skepticism arose.
A snake expert who owned at least 20 similar snakes in his shop said the incident was highly unusual for the python species as they are generally docile and timid. He argued that it was not impossible, but simply very unexpected and peculiar.
This was one of the most tragic attacks of this breed of snake. The python, which lived in the complex for almost ten years, was immediately killed due to this incident.
2. Snake owner charged with murder
Surprisingly, many cases of people being killed by large snakes actually happen in their own homes. Snakes that are escape artists can often be found outside of cages. These reptiles, which are kept as pets for many years, are usually unnoticed by their owners when they are not in the wild.
In Oxford, Florida, the owner of an albino Burmese python was sentenced to prison after his pet escaped from its confinement to kill his daughter Shanianna ( Shanianna) in her crib.
Photo. Law enforcement officers remove a 2.5-meter albino Burmese python from the house where it killed a 2-year-old girl.
On the morning of the incident, July 1, 2009, a python named Gypsy was found tightly wrapped around the two-year-old victim, its mouth beginning to swallow the victim's head.
While isolated incidents in the past have not resulted in any criminal charges, in this case, the incident involved 21-year-old owner and mother Jaren Hair ( Jaren Hare), is different. The 2.5-meter predator escaped from its aquarium with such ease that it once again showed the complete lack of care and concern for the defenseless daughter.
The aquarium where the python was kept was covered with a duvet on top of the cage. To make matters worse, the medical examiner testified that the snake was significantly underweight and malnourished, which was likely the cause of this incident.
Jaren Hare and her partner were found guilty of manslaughter of a child, third-degree murder, due to the snake attack.
3. Anaconda attacks TV show host
In an incident, a TV show host in the Amazon rainforest in Colombia was attacked by an angry anaconda. Hoping to get footage for his popular Brazilian television program, the famous Toninho Negreiro ( Toninho Negreiro), decided to catch an anaconda in the forest.
On this walk, Toninho was accompanied by El Diablo, a jungle legend who was said to have a mysterious power over snakes.
El Diablo reveals that he can smell snakes and leads Toninho and his team to the beautiful and equally dangerous Amazon. Soon, while walking, El Diablo freezes and throws himself into the grass; a second later he takes out an anaconda, which was almost three times longer than himself.
The anaconda was disturbed and began to wrap itself around El Diablo. He gave the reptile to Toninho, then took it back and released it into the wild.
Video. Anaconda grabs the TV presenter's hand
After this incident, Toninho left the team alone. Soon he began to call for help and people came running to him, seeing him in the arms of the anaconda. He was already in an extremely excited state, the snake instantly attacked him, squeezing his forearm with its jaws and coiling itself around his body.
In the end, five adult men with difficulty freed him from the suffocating embrace, but he still had to free himself from the jaws that the snake was not going to unclench. El Diablo helped free himself from the anaconda's teeth.
Although only his forearm was damaged by the attack, he recovered quickly and was back in the Amazon within two months to resume filming.
4. A boa constrictor almost kills a woman in Texas.
Even when a snake is trained and unfailingly calm, this does not change the fact that it is still a cold-blooded predator.
A Texas woman with years of experience handling large snakes was attacked by a 2.5-meter boa constrictor on July 26, 2011. Victim, Debi Grudzinski ( Debi Grudzinski) tried to give a snake named Aisnia ( Icenia) a little water, then everything happened.
Photo. Boa constrictor attacks a woman
This was a common practice she did daily as she had been taking care of Aisnia for almost eight years. In a shocking moment, the boa constrictor grabbed Debi's hand and began to wrap itself around her. By that time, Icenia had at least half her length wrapped around Debi's arm, the woman began to panic and her daughter immediately dialed 911.
Within minutes, help arrived. Debi began to feel weak and the snake had already squeezed the woman’s hand very tightly. The 911 rescuers had to quickly try to free Debi's hand from the reptile's jaws.
They were able to quickly free Debi without killing Aisnia. Debi signed all the necessary paperwork and her pet was sent to an animal shelter for recovery.
5. Python kills a careless student in Venezuela
In the summer of 2008, working the night shift alone at the zoo among numerous deadly predators, it is clear that he did not consider it potentially dangerous. Sooner or later, such carelessness could lead to sad consequences. At least zookeeper Eric Arrieta ( Eric Arrieta) violated the rules of the establishment and entered the cage alone.
A 3-meter Burmese python, which had recently been donated to the Caracas Zoo in Venezuela, caused the sudden death of a 29-year-old student.
Photo. Python attacks a student
The snake was quite new to its new habitat and was not even on public display at the zoo. Eric foolishly broke one of the most important rules of behavior at the zoo when he entered the snake's cage, a mistake that ultimately cost him his life.
Since he was the only one on duty, no one heard his moans or cries for help when the snake attacked him. Only in the morning his colleagues discovered him in a cage. By this time, the python had already strangled Eric to death and began to consume him. When the snake was actively swallowing the head of the murdered Eric, his colleagues intervened and freed his lifeless body.
While the attack itself was unusual as Eric was well outside the ideal size to serve as prey for a 10-foot snake, it was not a shock as Burmese pythons are the most aggressive of the large boa constrictor snakes.
6Pet Python Attacks Owner in New York
Burmese pythons are the most aggressive of the boa constrictors, but that doesn't stop people from taking them into their homes. There are dozens of python attacks on their owners every year, and this species is responsible for the largest number of injuries and deaths. Owners of these reptiles should always be aware that they must exercise extreme caution when handling them.
Photo. Python will attack its owner
19 year old Grant Williams ( Grant Williams) who failed to heed proper warnings and safe python handling practices met his death as a result. One day in 1996, he was found in the hallway of his apartment building, blood dripping from him, a 4-meter snake wrapped tightly around him.
Contact with a hungry python is a very foolish thing to do and certain procedures must always be followed. Grant was not careful in his latest attempt to feed the python. The snake was outside its cage, and the live chicken that Grant planned to feed the python was hidden in a box nearby. Creating such a situation was a fatal mistake for Grant.
Because pythons have a very keen sense of smell, the victim's family and friends believe the hungry snake smelled the chicken he regularly fed, but it only saw a moving target for its dinner, and that was Grant.
Although the snake did not even begin to swallow him as an alternative meal, unfortunately Grant did not survive the attack. Paramedics tried exhaustively to resuscitate Williams en route to the hospital, but unfortunately they were unable to do so. Grant was pronounced dead an hour later after he was taken to a nearby hospital.
7. 6-meter python against an angry mother with a knife
In Las Vegas, Nevada, a family of three temporarily shared their home with a 6-meter reticulated python. For several weeks, the parents of a 3-year-old boy, 25-year-old Melissa Melendez ( Melendrez Melendrez) and 26-year-old Anthony Melendez ( Anthony Melendrez) decided to take care of their friend's reptile.
Photo. Python that tried to swallow a 3-year-old boy
The house remained unexplored for the large snake until one day on January 20, 2009, the parents were unable to properly care for the python. After just a few weeks at the new place of residence, the reptile was able to move freely around the house.
Soon after gaining freedom, the snake came across something that satisfied its interest. Melissa and Anthony's 3-year-old son was in one of the home's bedrooms.
Without much hesitation, the snake bit and began to swallow the baby. By the time Melissa discovered this, her son was already slipping into unconsciousness.
She immediately called for help. It took six police officers, an animal control officer and Melissa with her handy kitchen knife to finally free her child from the aggressive snake.
The blue-faced child was rushed to hospital where he remained overnight. During this time, he recovered perfectly; the future of the injured snake was not so rosy. The snake was killed shortly after the incident, and the boy's parents were criminally charged for child abuse.
8. Horny python gets over a woman
Reticulated pythons are the strongest and longest reptiles on the planet. It is strongly recommended that at least one other adult be present when handling this large and powerful snake.
25-year-old Amanda Black ( Amanda Black), owner of a 4-meter reticulated python named Diablo ( Diablo), thought that she could cope with the reptile on her own.
Photo. Python managed to kill a woman
The pet was sick and appropriate medications were prescribed. Amanda took it upon herself to treat the snake, she needed to give medicine to the snake. According to Amanda's husband, Diablo did not like medical procedures or the process of receiving them.
Getting a python's large, strong and flexible mouth to open must certainly be approached with great care. Since Amanda tried to give the medicine, the snake naturally didn't like it and became aggressive. Ultimately, this was enough to attack and overpower her. During the attack, Diablo wrapped himself around Amanda and began to intensely squeeze her neck, which led to death from suffocation.
The python did not kill her in a predatory manner, as usually happens during most snake attacks on people. Diablo did not even try to swallow her after death, but immediately fled the scene of the crime. Snake expert Bowen Lagess says pythons larger than 2 meters should be handled by at least two people and especially if they are treated with medication.
9. Australian mother finds a snake in bed with her daughter
While it may seem that in many cases pythons attack people in their own homes when they adopt them as pets, there are some horrific reports of people finding these large reptiles having entered their homes uninvited. Most of these cases occur in regions where pythons are commonly found, such as Australia.
Photo. Mom and her daughter escaped from a python
In one such case, a woman went to bed on the night of January 5, 2013 with her 2-year-old daughter. She was soon awakened by the hissing of her cat and noticed strange squirming movements on her bed. Since Tess Guthrie's suspicion ( Tess Guthrie) forced her to take out her mobile phone to shine a light on what was moving; what she saw left her speechless. What was actually moving was a two-meter python sharing the bed with her and her daughter.
When she saw the python, it was already wrapped around the hand of Guthrie's little helpless daughter. Tess knew she had to act quickly, but when the python felt that the woman had caught him in the act, he began to fight back. Fearing that the python might kill her daughter, Tess immediately grabbed the long reptile. As the snake bit her daughter, Tess quickly grabbed the snake's head, forced the child to let go, and threw it across the room.
Frightened, they ran away from the room and waited until they took the snake from the house. Soon after, they were taken to hospital, where they spent the entire night being treated for wounds inflicted by the python.
10. A man saved his grandson from an anaconda
If we evaluate snakes by weight, then, undoubtedly, the anaconda, the largest species of snake on the planet, comes first. They can reach an astounding 8 meters in length and weigh up to 100 kg!
Some of these heavyweights live in South America, and sometimes people in this region have had bad experiences with these large snakes.
In one terrifying incident, a small Brazilian boy who lived in an area about 250 km northwest of Sao Paulo was killed by an anaconda.
Photo. Grandfather who saved his grandson from an anaconda
One afternoon on February 8, 2007, as he and a friend were playing near a stream, they would never have guessed that a 5-meter anaconda was watching them below the surface of the water.
As soon as Matheus ( Mateus) approached the water, the hidden anaconda decided to pounce on him. Using its 5-meter muscles, large jaws and teeth, the reptile easily pinned the boy down.
As she began to sink her teeth into Matheus's neck and shoulders, his friend ran for help. But not so soon he returned with Matheus's grandfather, who was ready to fight.
Photo. Scars on the body of a grandson saved from an anaconda
With a small machete and a grin, 60-year-old grandfather Mateus was able to finally free his defenseless grandson from the predatory beast that had been fighting him for almost thirty minutes.
After the savage attack, Matheus was immediately rushed to hospital. After the incident, the 8-year-old boy looked quite well. After placing the 21st stitch on his chest where he was bitten, he quickly recovered. He was very lucky to survive the attack and did not even have any broken bones.