![]() Squeezing the breath out of an animal takes a lot of energy. This suggests that constrictors have an innate ability to react to a victim’s heart, but experience tells them how strongly they should do so. They did, however, use less pressure than the wild ones. They had never killed a victim with an actual heartbeat before, but they responded to the artificial beats in the same way as the wild snakes. Some of Boback’s boas had been caught in the wild, but others had been reared in captivity and had always lived on a diet of dead rats. If Boback stopped the hearts after 10 minutes, the pythons stopped constricting a few minutes later. And all the while, they kept on tightening, bit by bit. If the artificial hearts were beating, the boas constricted the rats for twice as long and with twice as much pressure as when the hearts were still. In this way, he could isolate the influence of the heartbeats he didn’t have to worry about other movements that might confuse the results, such as struggling muscles or panicked breaths.īoback clearly showed that boas finely adjust their coils to the beats of their prey. He fitted the bodies of dead rats with artificial hearts – two tiny water-filled bulbs connected to a pump – and pressure sensors to measure the snake’s squeezes. It would be virtually impossible to measure the heartbeat of a live rat while it was being crushed by a snake, so Boback opted for a macabre alternative. When the heart stops, the snake starts to relax. Through its thick coils, a boa can sense the tiny heartbeats of its prey. ![]() Scott Boback from Dickinson College has the answer. We’ve known this for centuries but amazingly, no one has worked out how the snakes can tell when to stop constricting. Every time the prey exhales, the snake squeezes a little more tightly. It uses the momentum of its strike to throw coils around its victim’s body. To a boa constrictor, those beats are simply a sign that it hasn’t finished killing yet.Ī constricting snake like a boa or a python kills its prey by suffocation. To fans of cheesy pop music, the beat of someone else’s heart is a symbol of romantic connection.
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