The largest snack ever eaten by a snake was an impala antelope. It was devoured by an African rock python. The snake didn’t chew its enormous meal into pieces. It swallowed the impala whole!
Which snake squeezes its prey to death?
A boa constrictor holds its prey in its teeth, and then wraps its coils tightly around it. The snake does not crush its victim to death but squeezes it until it suffocates.
Is it true? A snake can go for more than three years without food.
Yes. It can take snake weeks to digest a large meal. So they don’t need to eat very often. A pit viper once survived without food for three years, three months a world record.
Amazing! There are many scary stories of snakes swallowing people. But only a few of them are true. In 1979, a young boy in South Africa was seized by a 4.5 metre-long African rock python. His friends ran off to get help. When they came back about 20 minutes later, the snake had swallowed the boy whole.
Why do snakes have elastic jaws?
A snake has sharp, backward-pointing teeth. Its teeth are good at holding food but can’t bite it into chunks. Instead, snakes swallow their prey whole. Snakes have amazingly stretchy jaws, with elastic-like hinges between their jawbones. This means they can open their mouths very wide, to swallow food larger than the size of their heads, such as eggs.
Picture Credit : Google