Don’t worry: We were just thinking that maybe you needed another reason to be afraid of snakes, the legless reptiles that already haunt our dreams with their strong and often poisonous bites and constricting abilities, and now we have you covered. A couple days ago, a man named Christopher Reynolds came across a snake while leaving his mother’s house, and when he realized that it was in the process of regurgitating another live snake, he thankfully started filming (via Gizmodo).
Sure enough, the video shows the black snake throwing up the complete and living other snake, stretching and contracting all of its muscles to work the muscular death tube out of its body. Sara Ruane, an assistant professor at Rutgers University, explained to Gizmodo that while this may seem pretty wild, it’s actually a fairly common escape mechanism.
“Snakes eat each other all the time,” she said. “When snakes are startled by something or something is attacking them, one of their first lines of defense is to throw up whatever is in their stomach.” She added that since the snake quickly shed a significant amount of weight, its ability to flee is greatly increased by throwing up its most recent meal. And for the record, Ruane suspects that the larger snake is a coachwhip (or Masticophis flagellum).
Are their any other bonkers animal escape mechanisms that you can think of? Let us know in the comments below, although we’re skeptical that you’ll find something freakier than this.
Featured image: Christopher Reynolds/YouTube
