Apr 7th, 2017: Better to be the King

[xoxoxoBruce]

Better to be the Kingsnake anyway, because you’d be like the “Raging Bull” of the small snakes.

Professional fighters have weight classes for a reason: no matter how adept the smaller fighter is, a much bigger one will
probably have some sort of advantage. But size is rarely an issue in the snake world if a kingsnake is competing—and the
little snake usually eats the bigger snake. So there’s that.

A pair of American researchers wanted to know how these little snakes, only a few feet long, could feast on snakes
sometimes 120 percent their size, especially since both the kingsnake and the larger snakes they might prey on use the
same killing technique. The jury’s still out, but the answer is probably in their coils.

The researchers still don’t know for sure what makes the kingsnakes such great killers. But the only noticeable difference
between them and ratsnakes was the amount of pressure the snakes exerted on their prey and in the way their bodies
arranged in coil, according to the research published last month in the Journal of Experimental Biology. “The kingsnakes
are little brutes,” he said. “They’re just stronger than other snakes.
They use that elegant and simplified parallel body loop. Rat snakes are variable and haphazard in their body application.”

It's my brother's birthday so I thought this post would be appropriate.

They cut a bunch of these snakes open and could find no difference in the muscle structure, so they think the Kingsnakes prowess
is in technique. It's like the ladies have been saying all along, it ain't what you got, it's what you do with it.

link