Prática de Shadowing: How do snakes swallow animals so much bigger than they are? - Niko Zlotnik - Aprenda a falar inglês com o YouTube

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How can a bigger tube fit inside a smaller tube?
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This might sound like a riddle, but it’s a practical dilemma in our snake-eat-snake world.
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This eastern kingsnake, for example, has a mouthful of a Texas rat snake, but the rat snake’s longer than it is, so how can the kingsnake possibly swallow it whole?
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This is just one of countless predatory dilemmas snakes have solved.
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Since slithering onto the scene some 150 million years ago, evolving length and limblessness out of their ancestral lizard forms, snakes have diversified rapidly.
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Their noodly bodies and flexible heads granted them access to novel places and prey.
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And today, there are nearly 4,000 snake species, spanning habitats high and low, wet and dry.
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All are carnivorous, but their diets range from fish eggs to alligators.
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Jaw-dropping anatomy allows most snakes to swallow their meals whole.
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Because their jaw bones aren’t fused like ours but connected by an elastic ligament and the bones on the sides of their lower jaws flare apart, they can dramatically stretch their maws.
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Reticulated pythons can even achieve 180-degree gapes.
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Sharp, curved teeth also line many snakes’ jaws, keeping prey from wriggling out.
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And to prevent suffocation when choking down a big meal, many snakes shift the position of their airways’ entrance and isolate which rib cage regions they inhale with.
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Pythons are also equipped with stretchy tissue along their jaws, enabling them to spread four times wider than their own skulls.
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They’ve been documented using this skill to eat hyenas, alligators, and— yes— even humans, whole.
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Their skin might sag after all the stretching and it could take weeks to metabolize meals this large, but it seems their intestines have special cells for helping digest bones, and they can sometimes survive for over a year on just one feast.
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African egg-eating snakes, meanwhile, consume large, intact bird eggs, piercing their shells in their esophagi using inward-facing vertebral spines.
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But while many snakes make a show of swallowing things whole, crab-eating snakes often pry their prey’s limbs off one-by-one and blindsnakes decapitate their termite targets, probably to prioritize their more digestible bodies.
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Some blindsnakes actually use chemical secretions to repel their prey, because it allows them to hang out in ant colonies, snacking on their inhabitants without being attacked.
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Their skills have even been noticed by other species.
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Eastern screech owls sometimes place blindsnakes in their nests, where they eat the insects that might otherwise harm their young.
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In fact, baby owls with a blindsnake nestmate have higher rates of growth and survival.
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The same can't be said for other species.
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Turtle-headed sea snakes scrape fish eggs off coral reefs.
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And cat-eyed snakes hunt red-eyed tree frog eggs.
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However, even as embryos, the developing frogs can sense an attacking snake’s vibrations and may prematurely hatch to escape.
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It’s a sacrifice— but at least it’s not certain death by serpent.
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Garter snakes, meanwhile, go after western newts even though their skin is packed with a potent neurotoxin.
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Just one bite could kill a person, but garter snakes swallow the newts unscathed, since modified proteins in their nerve cells prevent the toxin from binding.
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Not only that, but since the toxin may remain in their livers for weeks afterwards, it may even end up lending garter snakes protection against their predators.
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However, snakes more often make their own toxins, injecting or spitting venom from specialized glands out of grooved or syringe-like fangs.
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Philippine cobra venom is full of fast-acting neurotoxins that cause paralysis and respiratory failure.
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West African saw-scaled viper venom is a cocktail of compounds that cause profuse bleeding and tissue death.
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And while inland taipans are thought to possess the world's most potent venom, they tend to reserve it for quickly killing rodents.
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But we still haven’t answered how smaller snakes can consume bigger ones.
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It turns out that the kingsnake does this with an elegant trick.
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Once it runs out of space in its flexible stomach, it stretches and compresses its spine, shoving the rattlesnake into a kinked, zig-zag shape within its digestive tract.
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So a post-meal X-ray may look like this.
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Sorry, we know the truth can be hard to swallow.
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Unless, of course, you're a snake.

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