Tag : Python

Washington: Biologists at the University of Cincinnati found that it's not just the size of a Burmese python's head and body that allows them to eat almost everything. They evolved super-stretchy skin between their lower jaws that allow them to consume prey up to six times larger than similar-sized snakes. The study, funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation, was published in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology. Since most snakes swallow prey whole, they must have wide mouths to accommodate a meal. Unlike our lower jawbones, the lower jawbones of snakes are not connected, allowing them to open wide. "The stretchy skin between left and right lower jaws is radically different in pythons. Just over 40% of their total gape area on average is from stretchy skin," lead author and UC biology professor Bruce Jayne said. "Even after you correct for their large heads, their gape is enormous." Pythons are constrictors. They bite their prey and wrap their powerful coils around it, fatally cutting off the animal's vital blood flow, before consuming it whole at their leisure. The bigger the prey, the more energy a snake derives from a meal. For pythons, that means not having to hunt as often, which can carry extensive risk in a world full of busy roads and dangerous predators. Along with pythons, Jayne studied the gape size of brown tree snakes, a mildly venomous arboreal specialist that hunts birds and other animals in the forest canopy. Brown tree snakes were introduced in the 1950s to Guam, wiping out many bird species. Besides measuring the snakes, Jayne also measured the dimensions and weight of potential prey animals. This allowed Jayne to use snake size to predict the maximal size of its prey and the relative ...