- The Hog-nosed snake has an even wilder deceit up its sleeve. Or rather, tail.
My dogs roused a HNS one spring here in Eastern Kentucky one day. Trying to save it, I witnessed the "play dead" behavior and totally bought into it. I took the dogs back to the house. Looking out the window a moment later I saw a ripple in the grass across the pond; I watched the snake enter the water.
When it began to swim, and there was something very weird about the silhouette. I got my binoculars, focused on the swimming snake and... it was swimming backwards, tail in the air, head under water. The tail was held high, with a slight kink in the end. It looked like a periscope. Anyone attacking the the head would get a mouthful of tail.
It was the oddest, most compelling thing I've ever seen, so odd that didn't really believe my eyes. But I looked around in the layman's snake lit online and found the behavior described exactly as I 'd witnessed it.
- The Hog-nosed snake has an even wilder deciet up its sleeve. Or rather, tail.
My dogs roused a HNS one spring here in Eastern Kentucky one day. Trying to save it, I witnessed the "play dead" behavior and totally bought into it. I took the dogs back to the house. Looking out the window a moment later I saw a ripple in the grass across the pond; I watched the snake enter the water.
When it began to swim, and there was something very weird about the silhouette. I got my binoculars, focused on the swimming snake and... it was swimming backwards, tail in the air, head under water. The tail was held high, with a slight kink in the end.
It was the oddest, most compelling thing I've ever seen, so odd that didn't really believe my eyes. But I looked around in the layman's snake lit online and found the behavior described exactly as I 'd witnessed it
- Bless you Radiolab for remembering that we read! (I can no longer go out of my house, lest I have to speak to humans whose words are not in italics or surrounded by quotation marks...)
But you have brought joy! I happen to belong to the small but ever-hopeful band of those who read physics for fun though, we have no prayer of understanding it. The intellectual version of the Jamaican Bobsled team... We thank you...
