Dave Taylor's African Safari: Trophic Level III: Omnivores and Small Carnivores - Rock Python

Trophic Level III: Omnivores and Small Carnivores
Rock Python
Page 6

Python sebae

Length: 2.75 - 4.5m; rarely to 7m (9 -15 feet; rarely to 23 feet)

Status: Common, but declining in parts of their range near human settlements; often hunted for their skin.

Habitat: Rock pythons are found in grasslands, open woodlands, rocky areas and along the edges of rivers and lakes.

Food: Rock pythons eat small antelopes (dikdik, klipspringer, Thomson’s gazelle), jackals, hares, hyraxes, monkeys, waterbirds, monitor lizards, fish and small crocodiles.

Social System/Behavior: Rock pythons will use an old aardvark den, termite mound or cave as a nest. The female coils herself around the eggs to protect them from predators. The nest may lie at the end of a 6 meter (20 foot) long tunnel. There, she lays 20-60 eggs. Young hatch in 10 -15 weeks.

This python is Africa’s largest snake.The biggest prey on record taken by a constrictor was a 130 pound antelope swallowed by an African rock python.

Human beings usually eat less than 10% of their body weight at a meal. Pythons and other snakes routinely consume 25% of their unfed body weight. It is not unusual for them to eat 65% of their weight. One snake actually consumed 160% of its own unfed weight!

Pythons kill by grabbing their prey with their sharp, backward-pointing teeth. The bite, while painful, will not kill the prey. This is done by wrapping coil after coil around the body, slowly tightening the grip until the animal cannot breathe. With large prey, the snake likes to wrap its tail around a solid object, such as a tree trunk, to anchor its own body.

Digesting Prey

To swallow its prey, the snake can dislocate its jaws. It can open its mouth to an angle of 130 degrees (humans can open theirs only to 30 degrees). The snake's lower jaw is split in two to allow this wide opening. It can also dislocate its lower jaws and unhinge them. The snake literally stretches its head around the victim's body.

Snakes always swallow their prey head first. Muscles in the cheek and throat slowly move the victim’s body into the throat. The snake extends the muscles on one side of its body and then the other. It "walks" its body over the prey. Stomach muscles take over when the prey reaches it. A snake’s ribs are not attached to its spinal cord and can move outwards in order to accommodate large prey. To further help the prey slide down the digestive tract, the snake produces large amounts of saliva that coat the victim.

Time Between Meals

It can take a snake several days, weeks or even months to digest large prey. That presents the snake with a major problem. Upon death, the bacteria that occur naturally in an organism begin to decompose it. Snakes cannot tolerate a badly decomposed body in their gut and will regurgitate it. As soon as they swallow their prey, they enter a race between the natural processes of decomposing and the processes of digestion.

Obviously, the snake wins the race most of the time, but just how it does this is quite impressive.

To give itself an edge, the snake will seek a warm place to digest its food. Studies have shown that Indian pythons which were each fed a rabbit, digested it in four or five days in temperatures of 82 degrees. At 71 degrees, it took a week for the rabbit to be digested and at 64 degrees, the rabbit was still in the digestive system after two weeks. If it gets too cold, the snake will not feed at all.

(Author's note: It takes humans less than a day to digest food and produce feces from the unused portion of the food. A hummingbird processes its food from swallowing to feces production in less than an hour.)

Snake Metabolism

Snakes produce extremely strong hydrochloric acid in their digestive systems to aid in the breaking down of bones, hooves and horns. This is the same acid that humans produce in their stomachs but, unlike us, the snake must produce the acid for a long period of time. Humans double their output of digestive acids. A large snake increases its output by 60 times. This requires increased metabolism.

When humans or other mammals exert themselves, they increase their rate of breathing, taking in needed oxygen. The oxygen burns off the needed stored energy to complete the task. Mammals, however, only sustain their rapid breathing for short periods of time. In humans, a tenfold increase in oxygen consumption has been recorded when running. In contrast, humans only increase their oxygen consumption 20 to 25% when eating.

Large snakes increase their oxygen consumption by 36% when feeding on a meal equal to 65% of their body weight. The largest prey would demand even more oxygen, possibly equal to 100 times that which a resting snake requires. This incredible increase of metabolic rate is needed to produce the large amount of acid needed to digest the prey before it decomposes. In total, a snake increases its oxygen consumption by 3.6 % compared to a 20% increase in human oxygen consumption while digesting food.

Snakes also increase the length of their intestines when digesting prey. So do humans, but in our species, it is only a small amount.

The animal is dissolved head first.

Having fed, it may be a month or longer before this snake needs to feed again. It will find a safe burrow to rest in until it is ready to find a hiding place from which to ambush its next meal. It can afford to wait a week or longer for its prey to pass by. That is an advantage of being cold-blooded.

Predators: Lions, leopards and crocodiles will all feed on an adult snake if they come across it. Baby snakes are fed on by a number of small mammals and bird predators.

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