Awards season may be over for human actors this year, but there’s no rest for some of nature’s most audacious actors.
Dice Snakes Can fake your own death when attacked by predators, putting on a theatrical display that includes smearing themselves with their own poop and letting blood flow from their mouths.
And dice snakes that use these extra dramatic effects spend less time faking their own death, and consequently less time in a dangerous situation, than their counterparts who don’t use this strategy, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters. .
Many different animals fake their own death as a defense mechanism against predators, with examples seen among insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, but it is still unclear how and to what extent it works.
“There are conflicting theories about the origin of death simulation,” Vukašin Bjelica, a research associate at the University of Belgrade in Serbia and one of the study’s authors, told CNN by email.
“Some say it is a conscious response, while others insist it is not. “One theory is that it is the ‘most primitive’ defense response, similar to freezing in a high-stress situation,” he said.
Remaining motionless and exposing vulnerable body parts to a predator is risky, so researchers at the University of Belgrade hypothesized that the more dramatic the spectacle, the less time the snakes would have to spend in danger.
To test this, the researchers traveled to Golem Grad, an island in a lake in northern Macedonia, where snakes are common.
There, they grabbed 263 of the non-venomous dice snakes and pinched them with their fingers to simulate the actions of a predator, before releasing each snake and timing its subsequent behavior while feigning death.
They observed that some snakes were playing dead, leaving their mouths wide open, some were smeared with poop, and others were also exuding blood from their mouths.
The 28 snakes that bled from the mouth spent two seconds less on average faking their death, the study found, although some snakes that didn’t unleash all the theatrics also spent less time pretending to be dead, perhaps due to other factors such as temperature. , sex or size.
Overall, the snakes spent between six and 24 seconds playing dead.
Bleeding from the mouth was a relatively uncommon behavior and was observed in only 28 of the snakes tested, while spotting occurred in 124 of the cases.
Not all of the snakes analyzed faked their own death. Young snakes captured a feigned death for a much shorter period of time and bled much less from the mouth, and these behaviors were completely absent in newborn snakes of a similar species, the study found, perhaps due to the dangers associated with that.
Antipredator behavior depends on many different things, such as the sex of the individual, body temperature, size, age, the presence of food in the intestine, the presence of eggs in females, previous experience with a predator, and injuries. pre-existing, Bjelica said.
“It is still not exactly clear how each individual ‘adapts’ its anti-predator response and our observations are mainly limited as most of them come from interactions with human researchers and not from observations of real-life encounters with natural predators,” he added.
Smearing yourself with poop makes the snake less palatable to its predator, which researchers say explains why snakes that do this before playing dead spend less time in this situation.
While snakes do not directly spit blood at their predators, as horned lizards do, bleeding from the mouth indicates their apparent death to the predator. Researchers believe the bleeding is caused by an increase in blood pressure, triggered by high levels of stress hormones, Bjelica said.
The study’s results now need to be replicated in other species and ecosystems, the researchers said, adding that future research should focus on the precise sequence of behaviors displayed.