While Burmese pythons can eat deer and 100-pound alligators, these meals nonetheless do not measure as much as these consumed by the little egg-eater relative to both its size or mass.
Jayne introduced his findings within the Journal of Zoology.
“This particular group of snakes may be No. 1 when it comes to big mouths in the snake kingdom,” Jayne advised the Times.
Associate Professor Bryan Maritz on the University of the Western Cape in South Africa was not a part of the research however has been conducting related analysis on snake skills, significantly “how the hell does a tiny, tiny snake like this swallow a bird egg?”
Maritz advised the Times that Jayne’s research stands out as a result of it upends conventional considering in relation to estimating the dimensions of prey a snake can swallow.
“We’ve always just relied on proxies for snake gape,” Maritz advised the Times. “We’ve said, ‘Well, gape is correlated broadly with head length, and so you can measure a snake’s head length and you can estimate its gape.’ And this study really shows that that’s not the case.”
Read the New York Times story.
Featured picture at high: A quail egg is only a snack for a Gans’ egg-eater in a UC biology lab. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand
