Playing drained and spewing blood line gets the job done for feinting dice snakes , who have evolved a dramatic but good way of putting would - be piranha off their repast . They ’ll stop at nothing , with autohaemorrhaging , convulsive twisting , and even smearing themselves with darn all on the menu .
The telling performance comes fromNatrix tessellata , a semiaquatic species that mostly eat fish and can be found hunting for them across western Europe , northern Africa , the Middle East , and Central Asia to Western China . When it ’s not hunting , it ’s prey for a wide variety of predators including other reptiles , birds , and mammalian .
With so many on your rump , it pays to employ more than one form of antipredator defense , and several coinage exhibit a complex regalia of “ do n’t eat on me " strategies . demise feigningis what the authors of a unexampled study describe as an “ particularly interesting ” antipredator defense , not least because it ’s a speculative strategy to resist take flight – and it ’s one that the dice serpent excels in .
Dice snakes really go the extra mile when it comes to playing dead.Image credit: © V Bjelica, A Golubović,Biology Letters2024
When it looks like the crisp are down , their swansong affect a combination of lying motionless in an “ I am deceased ” posture , defame themselves with feces and musk , and autohaemorrhaging – aweird trickwhere creature volitionally bleed . The researchers wanted to try out if the combination of all these spectacular showing makes for a more convincing ( and therefore more effective ) go at end feigning , and so they tested 263 dice Snake in the athletic field .
They grabbed die snakes by the mid - body and immediately saw the fauna bug out to coat themselves in fecal matter and musk , a smirch behavior that ’s thought to put off the piranha by making its prey repulsive . They then handled the snake in the grass in a way that mimicked what a vulture might do , before come in them down – unharmed – on the level .
The dying feigning kick in once the snakes were on the footing , as the brute ’ mouths lolled open , tongues flaccid . They then timed the expiry feigning continuance , and observe if anything else happened , such as blood drop from the Snake ’ mouth , before identifying their age and sex and letting them go .
The results showed that older snakes were more potential to combine the smearing of feces and musk with sham numb , and that they incline to spend less clock time playing dead compared to younger snakes . The researchers propose this indicate that these behaviors have synergetic effects , make the more complex execution more believable so that the marauder is play a joke on and desolate its disgusting dead meal .
There are some limitations to the findings in that the snakes ’ behaviour were n’t made in response to real prey - predator interactions , but it ’s a funny perceptiveness into the complex elbow room in which animals have evolved to get out of a bind .
advanced , even if it does pass on you compensate in your own poop .
The study is published in the journalBiology letter .
