Why can king snakes eat rattle snakes?

Snakes have no ears. Most see about as well as Mr. Magoo. They don't have noses but they can smell very adeptly.

The fangs of venomous snakes, which evolved from teeth, are among "the most advanced bioweapon systems in the natural world," says Freek Vonk of Leiden University in the Netherlands. And those interesting tales aren't even on this list! In order to solve a longstanding mystery of how a king snake can eat another snake that's longer than itself, Kate Jackson of the University of Toronto and colleagues recorded and watched the whole thing unfold.

The king walks its jaws over the prey in ratchet fashion, then compresses its own vertebral column like an accordion to make the incoming snake go down. Then when all is said and done, the the king pukes some back up. Can you blame him?

Many rattlesnake mothers will eat some of their non-surviving offspring, scientists learned in February, 2009. The postpartum cannibalism — moms in the study ate about 11 percent of their eggs and dead offspring. "A cannibal rattlesnake female can recover lost energy for reproduction without having to hunt for food, a dangerous activity that requires time and expends a great deal of energy," said Estrella Mociño and Kirk Setser, lead authors of the study and researchers at the University of Granada in Spain.

Look out below! If paradise tree snakes want to get from one tree to another without climbing down, they fly. Well, glide, really.

To get airborne, they either drop from a branch or actively leap off the branch to get a little more height in order to glide farther.