Snakes

Colin

Gold Member
Aug 11, 2009
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England
GARDEN SNAKES CAN BE DANGEROUS...

Snakes also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis) can be dangerous.
Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes. Here's why.


A couple had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife
was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze.


It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of
the plants. When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go
under the sofa.


Terrified, she let out a very loud scream.


The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to
see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the sofa.


He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it.


About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind.


He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor.


His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up,
told him to lie still and called an ambulance.


The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests,
loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.


About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and one
of the Emergency Medical Technicians saw it and dropped his
end of the stretcher. That's when the husband broke his leg and why
he is still in the hospital.


The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on
a neighbour who volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with
a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch.. Soon he decided
it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief.


But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where
she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted,
the snake rushed back under the sofa.


The neighbour man, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use
CPR to revive her.


The neighbour's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the
grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth
and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of
canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where
it needed stitches.


The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbour
lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that the snake
had bitten him. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey,
and began pouring it down the man's throat.


By now, the police had arrived.


They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed
that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all,
when the women tried to explain how it all happened over a little garden snake!


The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbour and his sobbing wife.


Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one
of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and
hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered
and, as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.


The other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the
window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out
and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it
and smashed into the parked police car.


Meanwhile, neighbours saw the burning drapes and called in the fire
department. The firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they
were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires,
put out the power, and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square
city block area (but they did get the house fire out).


Time passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was
repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all was
right with their world.


A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a
cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they
should bring in their plants for the night.


And that's when he shot her.
 
possum `fraid o' snakes...
eek.gif

Snakes Hunt in Groups, Study Suggests
May 24, 2017 - One snake can be scary enough, but a new study suggests some of the slithering reptiles hunt for prey in groups.
Researchers from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville say the Cuban boa, the “largest native terrestrial predator” on the island they are named after, coordinate their hunts in the island’s bat caves. Vladimir Dinets, who led the study, said the boas hang from the ceiling of cave entrances at dusk and dawn, when bats either enter or leave the cave. From that position, they are able to grab the bats in mid-air. Dinets said the snakes “coordinated their positions in such a way that they formed a wall across the entrance. This made it difficult or impossible for the bats to pass without getting within striking distance of at least one boa.”

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A new study suggests the Cuban boa hunts in groups.​

The hunts, he said, were always successful, and that the more snakes, the shorter amount of time is took each to grab a bat. Observing snakes hunting is difficult, with only a few of the 3,650 snake species having been seen hunting in the wild. "It is possible that coordinated hunting is not uncommon among snakes, but it will take a lot of very patient field research to find out," Dinets said.

Even the Cuban boa is getting harder to observe, because the snakes have been hunted for food and pets. "I suspect that if their numbers in a cave fall, they can't hunt in groups anymore and might die out even if some of them don't get caught by hunters," Dinets said. "A few of these caves are in national parks, but there's a lot of poaching everywhere." The study was published in the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition.

Snakes Hunt in Groups, Study Suggests
 

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