Cool, so. Lasso snakes are a thing.
We know, we know. We don’t like it either. And don’t get it twisted (heh). When we say ‘lasso snakes,’ we don’t mean Indiana Jones riding around on a horse and using a snake to hogtie the bad guys. That actually would be cool. No, we’re talking about snakes, on their own, contorting their body to form a lasso, in order to climb things to, presumably, murder you.
This terrifying new development was inadvertently discovered by researchers from Colorado State University and the University of Cincinnati while they were studying the conversation of Micronesian starlings, a native forest bird species threatened by invasive snake predation in Guam.
For the record, all snakes are invasive, but these particular snakes, brown snakes, are even more so.
That is what Thomas Seibert of CSU, a co-author of the study found out during the experiment. In the experiment, Seibert and fellow researchers installed tall, metal cylinders, known as baffles, onto an island in order to prevent snakes and other predators from reaching the bird boxes that held the starlings. Things were going swimmingly, until one son of a bitch brown snake decided to fuck around and find out what would happen if it tried to climb.
“Initially, the baffle did work, for the most part,” Seibert said in a press release. “Then all of a sudden, we saw this snake form what looked like a lasso around the cylinder and wiggle its body up.”
And thus, nightmare fodder was created.
Guam’s invasive tree snakes loop themselves into lassos to reach their feathered prey: https://t.co/QlXNp2f7PI pic.twitter.com/6leHkEjSWM
— News from Science (@NewsfromScience) January 11, 2021
This wouldn’t be the first time Satan’s pets would reveal themselves. Last year saw the emergence of ‘murder hornets’ who, as their name implies, can actually inflict death upon those whom they to sting. In any other year, ‘murder hornets’ would have been one of the most closely-followed stories of the year. But 2020 was not just any year and ‘murder hornets’ lasted about as long as former(!) President Trump does in bed. Which is to say, not very long.
‘Murder hornets’ were a bad omen for 2020; let’s just hope lasso snakes don’t repeat history in 2021. And let’s also hope that we never, ever, ever come across one.
Cover Photo: National Geographic
It got worse: God Sends Murder Hornets to US to Show Things Can Always Get Worse (Or Possibly Another Democrat Sting Against the President)
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