Ever wonder what might happen if a python ate a porcupine? Well, wonder no more.
One of these giant snakes — which kill prey by suffocating it and then consuming it whole — recently dined on a porcupine and didn’t live to brag about it.
In fact, many species of snakes eat porcupines and other horned or quilled animals, according to a study published in 2003 in the Phyllomedusa Journal of Herpetology.
Pythons possess the incredible ability to alter their metabolism, as well as the size of their organs, after a meal.
This allows the a python to digest prey that is much larger than the snake is, according to a study published in 2013 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It still isn’t clear if this python’s spiky meal was actually responsible for the predator’s death. Rangers found the snake underneath a rocky ledge, where it had apparently fallen.
On impact, the quills inside its engorged belly may have pierced the python’s digestive tract, which could have killed the animal, Fuller said.
In the 2003 study, entitled “Prickly food: snakes preying upon porcupines,” researchers found that when a snake eats a porcupine, the animal’s quills are left undigested and are easily detectable in the snake’s gut.
Sometimes, the quills will even pierce all the way through the snake’s body, according to the study.
But there’s no word yet on whether this particular snake died because it was pierced by quills or because it fell off a ledge (or because it was pierced by quills as a result of falling off the ledge).
