Pythons, one of nature's top hunters, may not die of suffocation as we usually think.
As a top hunter, you naturally have top-notch equipment. To digress, water nymphs and pythons look a lot like us outsiders, but water nymphs are very different from pythons. In terms of species alone, water nymphs are in the family Aphididae and pythons are in the family Anacondae. Moreover, water nymphs are oviparous (hatching inside the fertilized egg) and pythons are oviparous. The python's equipment includes the sharp barb teeth in the mouth, and once bitten, it will hook like a hook and it is difficult to escape. There are also muscles in the whole body, except for the bones.
This set of top-of-the-line equipment gives pythons powerful predatory abilities! Usually we think of pythons as dying by wrapping around their prey, thereby cutting off the oxygen supply, which is also suffocation. However, this is not the case, but death is caused by the blood supply being cut off.
Through the monitoring of the physiological changes of rats during the process of python hunting and killing mice, scientists found that during the process of entanglement and squeezing of pythons, the first pressure squeezed was the blood flow on the surface of the mice. Because, in the process, the arterial blood pressure of the prey is reduced in a straight line, and the vein is raised in a straight line. Blood circulation is blocked, which in turn causes the prey to die of lack of oxygen. Both methods of death are indeed hypoxic, but there are also differences.
Asphyxia and hypoxia emphasize that the body cannot get enough oxygen, that is, the breathing process is blocked; but cutting off blood flow is that there is oxygen supply but cannot be delivered, emphasizing that the blood circulation system is blocked. During the entanglement of the python, the prey can still breathe, but because of the squeeze, the breathing is weakened. In this process, the blood circulation is cut off, so the heart, brain, etc. cannot get oxygen, and eventually dies.
People tend to determine the cause of something because of simple cognition, but reality tells us that some cognition that is not experimentally verified is likely to be wrong. This is how pythons kill their prey, and so is the way bees make sounds. We usually think that bees make sounds due to wing vibrations, but reality gives us a slap in the face, and bees have their own vocal organs.
Therefore, theory needs to be combined with experiment, or theory needs to be combined with practice!
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > references:</h1>
Miao Miao. Pythons cut off the blood of their prey and cause them to die[J].Science Grand View Garden,2015,(20):59.