There are a few snakes in the world able to crush and kill people, but it is very rare says James Fair.
A paper written in the Journal of Herpetology in 1980 identified the world’s five largest species as all being implicated in attacks on humans, and in a limited number of cases, deaths.
They are the green (or giant) anaconda, the reticulated python, the African rock python, the Indian python and the Australian scrub python.
There was a case in 2017 when a reticulated python – the world’s longest snake – was found to have swallowed and killed a 25-year-old man on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.
The man went missing when he went to check on his palm tree grove, and the next day villagers saw the 7m python lying unmoving in a ditch. When it was cut open, they found his body.
And in 2018, a woman was attacked and eaten, also in Indonesia, also by a reticulated python. Going back further in time, a 14-year-old boy was swallowed by a 5m reticulated python in 1927, and unconfirmed reports suggest a woman was killed by an African rock python on Ukerewe Island in Lake Victoria.
Have any incidents been witnessed?
In 1979 in the Northern Transvaal of South Africa, two young boys were herding cattle along a path when one of them was grabbed by his thigh by a large python which had been lying hidden in the grass. His companion ran to get help, and when he returned with two villagers, the victim had been completely wrapped in the snake’s coils. After forcing it to retreat, they recovered the boy but he had already died.
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How can these snakes kill and swallow prey as large as humans?
One experiment carried out by a herpetologist at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania called Scott Boback sought to answer this question. They used a reticulated python called Sophia and a dead pig and they found that she exerted a pressure on the pig equivalent to 6 pounds per square inch (PSI).
Does that kill a human?
Boback explained that it’s often mistakenly believed that snakes squeeze their prey until they can’t breathe anymore, but that’s not correct. “6 PSI may seem modest but it can cause considerable internal damage in a live animal,” Boback said.
So what actually kills a person if they are constricted by a snake?
It’s not as straightforward as you’d expect, and scientists have a number of theories. For a long time, it was thought that victims died from asphyxiation, but it’s now believed that the constriction prevents blood from reaching vital organs, including the heart, and that’s why you die.
So, you heart stops beating and you die?
Yes, but there’s also a theory that (if you are squeezed really hard) the process forces blood towards you brain and increases the pressure in it to fatal levels. David Penning, from Missouri Southern State University (together with colleagues), has proposed that this mechanism works in the same way that fighter pilots experience a “red-out” effect as a result of powerful negative g forces. “Circulatory arrest may not be the the proximate mechanism of death in many cases where cranial disruption kills prey faster,” Penning says.
How are snakes able to swallow something as large as a human?
They can certainly swallow very bulky prey – deer and antelopes, pigs, alligators and crocodiles, as well as the very occasional human, are all occasionally consumed by snakes such as pythons and boas. Scientists say it’s a myth that the jaws actually detach from the rest of the skull – instead tendons and ligaments allow the jaws to stretch in a huge gape. In one study of non-native Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades, that gap was 81cm or the equivalent of a 32-inch human waist. Researchers watched one python swallow a 77lb (35kg) deer that was two-thirds of its total mass. That would be like an average man eating about 40kg in a single sitting!
Anything else worth knowing?
Not really, except that the boa constrictor holds a unique position in the animal kingdom. It is the only species where the common name (boa constrictor) is exactly the same as its scientific or binomial name – Boa constrictor.
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Main image and videos: Reticulated python © Getty
