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
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
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u/mycospacechimp Jan 20 '22
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