“Faster than a viper’s strike” is a phrase that
used to mean something, researchers long thought that vipers were the swiftest
of all snakes. Now, it turns out that some harmless snakes can strike just as
quickly as venomous
vipers, fast enough to literally make your head spin.
Researchers used high-speed cameras to measure the
strike speeds of two viper species, cottonmouth vipers and diamondback
rattlesnakes, along with Texas rat snakes (pictured), a nonviper species that
lacks venom.
They were all evenly matched in speed, and even the
slowest strike approached an acceleration of 100 meters per second squared, the
researchers report in Biology Letters. That’s twice the most intense g-forces experienced
by fighter-jet pilots, more than enough to make any human blackout.
The attack doesn’t take long, either. Strikes of
all three snake species lasted less than a tenth of a second, about half the
time it takes for a human to blink. But more importantly, that’s also faster
than the snakes’ mammal prey, like jackrabbits and kangaroo rats.
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