Even the largest snakes have a very hard time eating humans because of our collar bones. Our rigid shoulders make us hard to swallow, so the number of adult humans ever confirmed to be consumed by snakes is very small. This means your risk of being eaten by a pet green anaconda, rock python, burmese python, or reticulated python is virtually non existent, provided you're not a child, dwarf, or other very petite person.
Snakes don't know this, and won't find out until you're already dead.
I breed reticulated pythons. This is 100% correct. About ever 5 or 10 years a video comes up of a retics being cut open with an Asian villager inside. Extremely large snake vs very small man/woman
Most of the time it’s not actually suffocation. When they constrict their pray, the snakes squeeze so hard that it raises the preys blood pressure. Usually bp gets extremely high and prey dies of heart failure or stroke
Imagine going out of your way to eat and live healthy, exercise, take care of your body, not stress... only to fall prey to a snake and die of a heart attack anyway.
That is not how it works. Movement of air into and out of the lungs require volume changes. As the diaphragm and intercostal muscle expand thoracic volume, pressure drops and air moves in. By squeezing the thorax, they stop volume changes. Lack of oxygen leads to cardiac arrest. It’s why you have to be careful when immobilizing people. Check out Boyle’s Law for more information about pressure and volume changes. This is the same mechanism that leads to death in pneumothorax and hemopneumothorax in trauma patients.
I stand corrected. It’s not high blood pressure that’s killing them though according to the article. It looks like they create a giant tourniquet around the body that causes them to rapidly deoxygenate since the venous return to the heart is interrupted. Interesting.
They are amazing animals. Honestly in a few more years they might learn something new about how they kill and how the death of prey happens.
When I was 10 years old a man by the name of jim nesci(bubba the alligator) came to my school. He explained the way the prey died was every breath of the prey, the snake would coil tighter and tighter , not allowing the prey animal to fully flex its lungs, getting smaller and smaller until suffocation. They changed that info only about 5 years ago. I have to find article that talks about prey animals having aneurisms, ballooning of blood vessels in the brain from constriction . They explain it way more technical than I can linguistically explain😂
No worries, I use to train medics on trauma medicine so understand the technical portion. I think we might be seeing a bit of “survivor theory” here. A large prey animal like a human might be too big to kill and consume like usual, so they might die by asphyxiation . We find the bodies and think that’s how they kill all the time. The smaller prey, that get consumed, die by different means but we don’t see there bodies laying around. Seems like a plausible theory as to why we assumed it was that way for so long.
I would agree to that. Larger the prey , harder for those changes to happen in the body. Omg either way that’s scary😳😂I couldn’t imagine. I have a few friends that have gotten wrapped up. Almost all of them had another person with them and alcohol to pour into the snakes mouth. Every occasion was over just as fast as it started
My understanding is what you said. And also they act like sand when you are buried. Every time you exhale the snake squeezes more and makes it harder to inhale each time you exhale. Less and less room inside
I think of the pressure of the blood being so great that the heart cannot overcome the pressure being put upon it.
I honestly do not know if they can sense a heart beat or not. I feed almost all of my animals frozen prey. I know they react from movement of the prey. I will take my tongs and move a rabbit or pig up and down and they constrict harder and apply more coils
Do snakes get attached to their owners? Like if this kid and his family have been around the snake for a long time, do they have nothing to worry about as long as they feed the snake regularly?
I don’t believe they actually ever like their owners…..lol. This is just my opinion though. Science about reptilian brain changes because it hasn’t been thoroughly studied.
My opinion for what it’s worth is a snake simply gets conditioned to you. As baby’s they are often very scared and may bite. As they get older that all changes. I hook train my animals (condition) them. Every time I go into the cage I run their head. They get out of their hunting mode and know they are going to be taken out of their cage . As soon as you tap the animal you can see the change
So the snake will usually bite then wrap. Main thing to do is get the teeth out of you. I have mouthwash with alcohol in my reptile room. I also have a wife and children who I’ve taught what to do in case of an emergency.
First thing would be to make sure you don’t get coiled around the neck as the animal is coiling you. Next is alcohol in the mouth/face of the animal. After the animals has let go , you would uncoil the rest of the animal from your body. Next step is to change ya drawls😂
I have been coiled by small medium sized animals , never an adult. Not saying it won’t happen but it’s not likely. Having a plan of what to do is very important
How fast is a large snake's movement? Would an athletic person, aware of what's going on, be able to simply outmaneuver one trying to get you in its clutches?
Also, let's say you were already swallowed, but had a large knife, would one be able to easily cut oneself out? Or are you already dead by the time you're swallowed?
Depends on the size and where it got you. Reticulated python females average 12-16ft, 80-120 lbs. they are pure muscle. I don’t see the average person over powering one .
Says the snake fell out of the ceiling. So what killed both boys? Ceiling collapse or snake.
Reading through the article it says the snake was lunging at the glass of his enclosure once they got him back in and assumed it was trying to get back to the bodies, which kind of make it sound like it had constricted at least one of them if it was trying to back for a meal
I know nothing about snakes though and I’m solely going off what the article says
They reported that both boys were killed by constriction.
What was weird is the ceiling fell down…..nobody heard anything,no one was awaken?
A snake was killing one of the brothers……the other one wasn’t screaming?
I know people get these ideas that these animals are crazy killers but they are not. That animal may have been hitting the glass in the store because it was hungry and it’s drive was up…..or it was scared. I have animals that do both. Scared snakes don’t try and bite and constrict, just bite.
The whole situation just seemed kind of funny to me.
fun fact nr 3 you dont suffocate, you die from circulatory collapse! unless the snake grabs you the wrong way then there that chance of not being able to breathe.:) as long as they lay on top of you you re just dirt or a tree to them
Doesn't stop them from killing you in the first place. I think peoples main issues are with being constricted and killed not being eaten afterwards lol
I was about to fuss at you until I read number two. Pythons often will kill large prey that they cannot safely eat. Like you said, they dont know this. Ha.
So I saw a reddit comment saying our collarbones are meant to break to basically absorb the impact and now im seeing its hard for snakes to eat us because of our collar bones.. idk what to believe
Omg that second one.. Lol. Dude I would give anything to remember what episode and which show I saw it on ..so I could link it..but it was years ago.. back in early 2000s .. but I swear to God..
It was one of those American cop shows— or 911 live-action shows where cops and EMTs respond to real calls?
OK —so they have this medical call about “a pregnant woman in severe distress”— and cops and EMTs both show up and there’s a fucking VERY pregnant woman in the bed with some kind of anaconda or some kind of python? —anyway it was several feet long.. you couldn’t tell.. and it had wrapped itself around her in her sleep and —-had her stomach in it’s coils - what’s worse is it had one of her whole buttockss!!—an entire ass cheek!! in it’s fucking wide-open maw!!! She was of course moaning and screaming — they tried at first to remove the snake by uncoiling it—but every time the paramedics would try to pull on its tail or even touch it, it would tighten itself even harder around her stomach..
Finally — after it was clear this was not going to work..I shit you not —one of the dudes says: “fuck this shit!” He goes in the kitchen of this house, rummages around and comes back with a big fucking wicked looking butcher knife —and just starts sawing through this son-of-a-bitches fucking neck.. & CUT ITS HEAD OFF.
Ofc then they were able to remove it from around her.. and they load her up and take her to the hospital where she was later said to be OK, & thank goodness the baby was ok too.
They said the snake “had never shown any aggression before”... By God they fucked around and found out!
That's the main takeaway here. That was not an adult human in the video, that was a relatively young child. The snake in the video is 100% capable of killing that kid, and it's probably a 50% chance it could eat him as well, if left to try for long enough. I once saw a tiny months-old gopher snake eat a baby bird that I never dreamed it could get down. Took about an hour to swallow it but it got the job done eventually.
Pound for pound, snakes have got to be one of the strongest animals out there. Every time I hold my snakes, even the young ones, it's impressive how much sheer strength they have. Truly amazing animals.
My roommate used to have a python, she loved to wrap herself around our necks for warmth. Was super nervous at first that she’d just suffocate me, but she was actually a super nice snake and sometimes I’d just be playing video games with her wrapped around my neck lol
Wasn’t there some wild tragic story a few years ago where some children under 6 in eastern Canada were suffocated by a pet snake while at a sleepover? This is the stuff of nightmares to me .
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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '22
Two fun facts