SNAKES are cooking up a horrible stench to stop predators from eating them.
Animals around the world are known to fake death — also known as playing dead — as a defense tactic, but few go as far as the dice snake.
In an extreme version of this common trick, dice snakes have been observed smearing themselves with poop to deter predators.
Dead creatures defecate or urinate once shortly after passing due to their muscles relaxing, so snakes may be imitating this.
Some of the snakes go so far as to bleed from the mouth as well, as an additional desperate effort to ward off the birds of prey.
Those who pull off this Oscar-worthy feat spend less time pretending to be dead than those who don’t, according to research.
Scientists at the University of Belgrade in Serbia published their findings in the journal Biology Letters, based on snake data from a lake island in North Macedonia.
The scientists pretended to be predators, grabbing 263 snakes and pinching them like a hungry bird would, before releasing each one and analyzing their behavior.
It was here that they noticed that the reptiles began to play dead, quickly smearing themselves with poop and producing blood from their mouths.
But not everyone tried the tactic – just over 10% of them released “small puddles” or even “dripped bits” of blood.
This may be related to increased stress hormone levels, the report notes.
And 124 of them played the poop prank.
However, scientists timed them and noticed that the snakes that performed these theatrical scenes spent about two seconds less faking their death.
“Two seconds may not be much when you’re reading the newspaper, but it could be enough for a snake to successfully escape,” researcher Vukašin Bjelica told the New York Times.
“They really commit to the role, depending on the individual.”
The paper notes that temperature, gender or size could also be a factor.
Overall, the group of snakes spent between six and 24 seconds playing dead – and the youngest in the group spent much longer doing so.
“It is still not exactly clear how each individual ‘adapts’ its antipredator response and our observations are mostly limited, as most of them come from interactions with human researchers and not from observations of real-life encounters with natural predators,” Bjelica added.
FAKING DEATH IS NOT JUST TO AVOID PREDATORS…
Many animals appear to fake their deaths, but not all are designed to avoid being eaten by predators.
Some creatures have been observed using the feat to avoid unwanted mates.
Several female dragonflies have been seen doing this to avoid advances from male partners.
And the common European frog has been caught doing the same.
This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
