Venomous snakes inhabit a different perceptual world than we do.
“Before the mammal has even had a chance to detect them and start moving, they’re on top of you,” said Alistair Evans, a zoologist at Monash University in Australia.
That’s because in a race of reflexes, the snake usually wins. For a mouse or human, it takes less than half a second to register a threat and react. But venomous snakes are capable of launching themselves at and biting their prey in a small fraction of that time. “It’s ridiculously fast,” Dr. Evans said.
So fast that it’s been challenging to even visualize. But in a study published Thursday in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dr. Evans and his colleagues used high-speed video cameras to record and reconstruct the complex, rapid movements of 36 species of venomous snakes.
The result is a harrowing glimpse of the different approaches that these creatures take to sink their fangs into their victims.
To do this work, Dr. Evans needed snakes. So he reached out to Anthony Herrel, an evolutionary biologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris who collaborates on research with VenomWorld, a French company that produces venom used to make antivenoms.
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