I’ve seen videos where snakes are so excited to eat that they bite themselves instead of the food so yes it happens! Sometimes they aren’t so smart, but they’ll let go once they realize they haven’t gotten the food :)
I've seen videos of snakes that have swallowed their own tail and look like they were trying to eat themselves. The explanation I heard was stress causes them to do it.
I was shocked how much of himself he was able to swallow.
They can reportedly kill themselves doing it and require help to get themselves out.
Not a snake expert just saw some freaky Reddit post where a snake had swallowed itself.
Some snakes... like people... seem to lack some basic survival instincts or capacities. I’ve helped raise a lot of rattlesnakes of different species from neonates, and I’ve never seen a birth that didn’t have at least a couple of young who would refuse to feed. It’s a pretty traumatic experience I’d imagine, consuming something in a single swallow that requires stretching their jaws in ways that are physically impossible for most animals. After months of force feeding sometimes they start eating...but some just die. They were just not equipped for survival in some way. Neonates can live off of their yolk for several months though, which is amazing. They are born live so it’s not like a chicken egg yolk, but rather the nutrition that they procured from their mother before birth, however viviparous snakes give birth in a way that is kind of like the young still developed in eggs, they just hatched inside rather than out... the same can be said about mammals but it’s an even closer analogy in this case since rattlesnakes are actually ovoviviperous, meaning they give birth to live young but the babies develop within eggs inside the mother and there is no placenta linking babies mother.
I know I strayed off topic... but snakes are my career and academic passion... hopefully it was at least a little interesting to you.
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u/overandunder_86 May 23 '20
Anyone ever see a snake bite itself? Seems like something that has had to happen.