Someone just posted this on Twitter. I had to share, mostly because green tree pythons are gorgeous, but also because I hadn’t seen this behavior before.
The snake is doing something called caudal luring. It’s using its tail to imitate a worm of some sort, something that its prey would want to eat. This Spanish viper, also beautiful, is doing the same thing.
This is another tree python, this time in nighttime lighting.
Stephanie Zvan is one of the hosts for the Minnesota Atheists' radio show and podcast, Atheists Talk. She serves on the board of Secular Woman. She speaks on science and skepticism in a number of venues, including science fiction and fantasy conventions.
Stephanie has been called a science blogger and a sex blogger, but if it means she has to choose just one thing to be or blog about, she's decided she's never going to grow up. In addition to science and sex and the science of sex, you'll find quite a bit of politics here, some economics, a regular short fiction feature, and the occasional bit of concentrated weird.
Oh, and arguments. She sometimes indulges in those as well. But I'm sure everything will be just fine. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.
I had a baby corn snake–this was the one that survived getting stuck on some bug traps we had in the back of the lab (there were three all together but the other two were dead. We never figured out why we had three snake babies come into the lab in the first place). We used butter to de-stick him and I brought him home. I kept him for about 3 months, but he just never seemed to settle down and get used to having humans around, so eventually I fed him three times in a week to “fatten him up” give him time to get used to a new environment and turned him loose.
Oh, it’s not OT. I used crickets to feed him (he was pretty small) and he would sometimes do to caudal luring thing, though I didn’t know it was called that. Didn’t know it was a specific behavior. That’s cool.
I had a baby corn snake–this was the one that survived getting stuck on some bug traps we had in the back of the lab (there were three all together but the other two were dead. We never figured out why we had three snake babies come into the lab in the first place). We used butter to de-stick him and I brought him home. I kept him for about 3 months, but he just never seemed to settle down and get used to having humans around, so eventually I fed him three times in a week to “fatten him up” give him time to get used to a new environment and turned him loose.
Oh, it’s not OT. I used crickets to feed him (he was pretty small) and he would sometimes do to caudal luring thing, though I didn’t know it was called that. Didn’t know it was a specific behavior. That’s cool.
I didn’t know they did that …