Giant Rogue Python Swallows Deer Whole

It’s a link to a LiveScience article about a python in Florida doing just that. And it’s not unusual. Adult Burmese pythons can get as big around as telephone poles and grow to 27 feet long. They can eat prey as large as the aforementioned deer, sustaining the snake for months at a time.

When the pythons eat prey this large, interesting things happen to their insides. Their internal organs enlarge. In fact, previous studies show that the hearts of Burmese pythons can grow in mass by 40 percent within 24 to 72 hours after a large meal, and that metabolism immediately after swallowing prey can shoot up by fortyfold. (The snake’s heart goes back to normal size after a few days.)

According to ScienceNOW, this has long fascinated researchers.

Turning weak mammalian hearts into something similar to the pythons’ behemoths has been the longtime goal of many biomedical researchers. Bigger, stronger hearts can improve the flow of blood in people with cardiac disease.

Human hearts can grow—in both good and bad ways, says Leslie Leinwand, a cardiology researcher with the University of Colorado and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Although cardiac diseases can cause human heart muscle to thicken, heart enlargement from exercise is generally beneficial.

“Well-conditioned athletes like Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and cyclist Lance Armstrong have huge hearts,” she states. “But there are many people who are unable to exercise because of existing heart disease, so it would be nice to develop some kind of a treatment to promote the beneficial growth of heart cells.”

Enter the python heart. Leinwand set up experiments in her lab to test python heart growth. Her team confirmed that something in the blood plasma of pythons was inducing positive cardiac growth. They then began looking for specific changes by analyzing proteins, lipids, nucleic acids and peptides present in the fed plasma.

They used a technique known as gas chromatography to analyze both fasted and fed python blood plasma, eventually identifying a highly complex composition of circulating fatty acids with distinct patterns of abundance over the course of the digestive process.

The researchers then tested the fed-python composition on a fasting python and the fasting python’s heart grew, without eating anything.

Next, the team tried the mixture on mice. The animals were hooked up to “mini-pumps” that delivered low doses of the fatty acid mixture over a period of a week. Not only did the mouse hearts show significant growth in the major part of the heart that pumps blood, but the heart muscle cell size increased, without showing an increase in heart fibrosis—which makes the heart muscle more stiff and can be a sign of disease. There were also no alterations in the liver or in the skeletal muscles.

“It was remarkable that the fatty acids identified in the plasma-fed pythons could actually stimulate healthy heart growth in mice,” lab postdoc Brooke Harrison says. The team also tested the fed-python plasma and the fatty acid mixture on cultured rat heart cells, with the same positive results.

Will it have the same effect on humans? More experiments are required. But as the New York Times reports:

…the day may come when doctors literally prescribe snake oil for heart disease.

The research was published last week in Science.

Socha and his colleagues used high-speed video cameras to record Chrysepolea paradisi, one of five species of Asian tree-dwelling snakes, as they launched off a 15m (49 ft) tower! You can see the amazing footage here.

This “flying” is an important technique for these snakes. According to Live Science:

When these snakes leap, it’s not to nosedive; it’s to glide from tree to tree, a feat they can accomplish at distances of at least 79 feet (24 m).

Four cameras recorded the curious snakes as they glided. This allowed the scientists to create and analyze 3-D reconstructions of the animals’ body positions during flight.

The researchers found that the snakes never actually achieved a proper “glide” (where the forces generated by their bodies exactly counteract gravity). They didn’t exactly fall straight to the ground either.  Instead, Socha says, “the snake is pushed upward—even though it is moving downward—because the upward component of the aerodynamic force is greater than the snake’s weight.

“Hypothetically, this means that if the snake continued on like this, it would eventually be moving upward in the air—quite an impressive feat for a snake.  But our modeling suggests that the effect is only temporary, and eventually the snake hits the ground to end the glide.”

In other words, as Buzz Lightyear would say, the snakes are simply “falling with style.”

Do the curves of the snake, or body position, mid-air affect this flying-falling? The researchers intend to find out. Stay tuned and look out!

Image: Jake Socha