Like any other animal that you encounter, the snake has to have food to be able to survive. Despite the fact that snakes are cold-blooded creatures, they still must take in food, digested, and use that food both for storage and for energy.
What separates a snake from a lot of other kinds of animals yet still makes it quite similar to other reptiles is the kinds of foods that it eats. This may make you wonder what it is that makes up the snake’s natural diet?
The Snake’s Natural Diet
Whether you own a snake and need to be able to provide for its diet or you simply want to know what a snake will eat, there are a few things you should be aware of. Snakes are carnivores, which means that they prefer to eat meat above all other things. Larger size snakes, such as the cobra, Python, and others of this size will eat much larger organisms to maintain their diet. This can be animals the size of a coyote, small bear, or other creature that is large enough to maintain the diet of these mammoth snakes.
Some pythons, for example, can grow to be 30 feet longer or more. This means that they have a greater dietary need that must be met and so eating larger sized animals are able to accommodate that for them. To be honest, pythons have even been known to eat people. By crushing them with their enormous muscles in their bodies, they are able to kill the human beings and then begin the process of eating them by slowly pulling the corpse into their mouth and digesting it through their enormous stomach. Gross, there is no doubt, but highly effective.
For much smaller snakes, maybe even just a foot in length, the primary source of food are small insects such as crickets, roaches, and other nasty little bugs like this. They, too, are looking for meat to be able to devour and these insects provide exactly what they are looking for.
The vast snakes will eat such things as rats, mice, and other small critters like this. Because of the fact that their stomach can expand to the size of the food, as long as they are able to pull the food into their mouth they can begin the digestive process.
How Does a Snake Get Its Food
While understanding its diet helps you figure out what kinds of food it needs to meet, there is also a predatory aspect about a snake that is important about how it obtains its food. As mentioned, snakes are true predators which means that they do not go out gathering food, such as berries or plants. Instead, they are out hunting for the food that they want and will use their speed and guile to be able to attain that food.
The average snake is incredibly quick and has sharp teeth that help it to latch on to their prey. A snake will hide in the weeds, and a hole in the ground, or even hang from a tree waiting for its prey to come by. Once it is within the range, the snake quickly lashes out toward its food, sinking its jaws into the animal until it is completely submissive to the snake.
In some breeds of snake, they are able to inject a venom into their prey which paralyzes it, making it easy to be able to control and eat it. Others are able to simply kill off the prey by biting on it, and then can start to eat.
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