Fascinating Digestive System of Snakes
Pictures like this aren’t exaggerations. How does a snake digest it? You’d probably say, “Like any other living thing”. You could not be more wrong, Carl Zimmer explains in Life’s Edge . When most mammals (include humans) digest food, their metabolic rate increases by almost 50%. For rattlesnakes though, it rises seven times . For pythons, it is even more extreme - it rises ten times . In fact, depending on the amount (by weight) that a python ate, it sometimes rose forty-five times . But wait, there is one more comparison to make. The metabolic rate of a horse at full gallop rises thirty-five times. That means a python’s rate rose even more than a galloping horse… when it was doing nothing but digesting! Further, a horse can’t gallop at that rate for very long; whereas a python can keep at that metabolic rate for the two weeks it might take to digest its food. All this makes it clear that there’s something very different in how snakes digest their food, even when the prey is...