Depending on the species and the situation, mammals can react and make an observable motion anywhere between 60 and 395 milliseconds. Snakes probably evolved such quick strikes to compete with the reaction times of prey, Penning adds. "That means every snake has to close the distance between itself and what it's got to eat or when it defends itself." "It's not that the vipers are slow, it's that this very high-speed striking ability is something that seems common to a lot of snake species-or a wider array than people might've expected."Īnd that makes a lot of sense when you think about it, Penning says: "Every snake has to eat," he says. "I was really surprised, because this comparison hadn't been made before," Clark says. That's lightning-quick, considering that a Formula One race car accelerates at less than 27 meters per second squared to go from 0 to 60 in just one second. ![]() But to their surprise, the nonvenomous rat snake came in a close second at 274 meters per second squared. The rattlesnake scored the highest measured acceleration, at 279 meters per second squared. The team tested 14 rat snakes, 6 cottonmouths and 12 rattlesnakes, recording several strikes for each individual.Īll the snakes turned out to be speed demons, the team reports this week in Biology Letters. They waved the glove around until the animal struck, recording the whole thing with a high-speed camera. They put each snake inside a container and inserted a stuffed glove on the end of a stick. So the team set out to compare three species: the western cottonmouth and the western diamond-backed rattlesnake, which are both vipers, and the nonvenomous Texas rat snake. "As sexy as the topic sounds," Penning says, "there's not that much research on it." That means the research community could be ignoring the thousands of other snake species that populate the world. Penning and his colleagues started by digging into the existing literature on snake strikes. They found fewer than three dozen papers describing the physics and kinematics of snake strikes, most of which focused on vipers. The results hint that serpents' need for speed may be much more widespread than thought, which raises questions about snake evolution and physiology. Not so fast: When Penning and his colleagues compared strike speeds in three types of snakes, they found that at least one nonvenomous species was just as quick as the vipers. That means scientists have long assumed vipers must have the speediest strikes in town. "There's this kind of preemptive discussion that are faster," says David Penning at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. "Natural selection has optimized a series of adaptations around striking and using venom that really helps them be effective predators." "It's the lynchpin of their strategy as predators," says Rulon Clark at San Diego State University. Such stats come from studies of how a snake lunges, bites and kills, which have focused mostly on vipers, in part because these snakes rely so heavily on their venomous chomps. ![]() OL17403229W Page_number_confidence 90.52 Pages 118 Ppi 300 Republisher_date 20191105171037 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 899 Scandate 20191029055319 Scanner Scanningcenter cebu Scribe3_search_catalog isbn Scribe3_search_id 9781423116288 Sent_to_scribe Tts_version 3.When a snake strikes, it literally moves faster than the blink of an eye, whipping its head forward so quickly that it can experience accelerations of more than 20 Gs. ![]() Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 05:25:54 Associated-names Povenmire, Dan Marsh, Jeff Boxid IA1682311 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier
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