Snake Bites Its Way Out Through Another Snake's Stomach
This unlucky viper messed with the wrong centipede. Scientists think it's possible the centipede tried gnawing its way out of the snake after it was swallowed.
A group of researchers stumbled upon a grisly scene during a field study in Macedonia last year: a dead nose-horned viper with a centipede's head sticking out of its ruptured abdomen.
After a post-mortem, the scientists think it's possible that the centipede quite literally eviscerated the snake from the inside out.
"All of us were astonished, as nobody has ever seen something like this," Ljiljana Tomović, a herpetologist at the University of Belgrade, told Live Science in an email. [
Tomović and colleagues were tagging reptiles on May 14, 2013, on Macedonia's Golem Grad, a 44-acre (18 hectares) island in Lake Prespa that's crowded with thousands of tortoises, tens of thousands of dice snakes and hundreds of vipers. The remnants of the death match were discovered when one researcher, Dragan Arsovski, turned over a stone, Tomović said.
) was a young female that stretched about 2 inches longer than the centipede (7.9 vs. 6 inches, ) was a young female that stretched about 2 inches longer than the centipede (7.9 vs. 6 inches Golem Grad Snake Centipede , the researchers wrote last month in a brief report published in the journal
) was actually heavier than the snake, tipping the scales at 114 percent of the snake's body weight (4.8 vs. 4.2 grams, or 0.17 vs. 0.14 ounces).
Nose-horned vipers regularly take on small mammals, lizards and birds, and they've been known to eat centipedes successfully,
Nose-horned vipers regularly take on small mammals Golem Grad Snake Centipede , the snake "gravely underestimated" the size and strength of its prey, the scientist wrote.
were missing, or in other words, "the entire volume of its body was occupied by the centipede," the scientists wrote. For this reason, the researchers think it's possible the snake's dinner tried to claw its way out Golem Grad Snake Centipede , destroying the viper's internal organs along the way, before eventually dying.
"In general, this invertebrate is extremely tough: It is very hard to kill a full-grown
(personal observation)," the authors of the study wrote of the centipede. "Therefore, we cannot dismiss the possibility that the snake had swallowed the centipede alive, and that, paradoxically, the
This story was updated at 9:30 a.m. EDT on April 17 to add researcher comments.
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Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on
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Golem Grad Snake Centipede
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