If you’ve ever been morbidly curious about what it would look like to have a snake sink its deadly venomous fangs in you, you’re in luck. In new research out today, scientists have captured high-speed footage of snakes just as they’re about to go in for the kill.
Researchers in Australia and France meticulously (and safely) recorded dozens of species across the three families of venomous snakes mid-bite. They found that these snakes have important differences in how they attack their victims and deliver venom. The findings represent the most extensive documentation of venomous snake bites collected yet, the researchers say, and offer insight into the different ways these slithery reptiles have evolved to hunt their prey.
“This gives us a first opportunity to directly compare these three families of venomous snakes,” lead author Alistair Evans, a scientist studying the evolution of biomechanics at Monash University, told Gizmodo.
How to safely watch a snake bite
Evans has long studied how animals feed, particularly in their use of teeth. One of his newer PhD students, Silke Cleuren, was especially interested in snake bites. Recent advances in video technology have also now made it possible to capture the mechanisms of a snake strike and bite in better detail than ever.
But while Australia has its fair share of native venomous snakes, staying close to home would have limited just how many the scientists could have recorded under a controlled setting. Instead, they collaborated with scientists in France who had an existing partnership with Venomworld, a venom production facility in the country. This allowed them to closely study, for the first time, species from all three major families of venomous snakes: viper, elapid, and colubrid snakes.
All told, they recorded 36 species and more than 100 bites. For the extra squeamish, don’t worry: the snakes only bit a piece of ballistics gel wrapped around a cylinder intended to mimic prey.
“The main advantages of our study is that we examined the full strike behavior in the largest number of species while they were in the same conditions, and we videoed them at high speed (1,000 frames per second) and reconstructed their movement in 3D,” Evans said. “All previous studies had been with only a limited number of species—usually fewer than 10.”
No two snakes are the same
The team found all sorts of differences between the various snake families.
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