Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.Awards season may be over for human actors this year, but there’s no rest for some of nature’s most audacious thespians.Dice snakes can fake their own death when being attacked by predators, putting on a theatrical display that includes smearing themselves with their own poop and letting blood ooze from their mouths.Researchers examined three colors of dice snake in North Macedonia. – Jozef KautAnd dice snakes that use these extra dramatic effects spend less time feigning their own deaths, and consequently less time in a dangerous situation, than their counterparts that don’t use this strategy, a study published on Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters found.Many different animals fake their own death as a defense mechanism against predators, with examples seen among insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, but just how – and to what degree – it works is still unclear.“There are conflicting theories about the origin of death feigning,” Vukašin Bjelica, a research associate at the University of Belgrade in Serbia and one of the study’s authors, told CNN via email.“Some say it is a conscious response while others are adamant it is not. One theory is that it is the ‘most primitive’ defense response, similar to freezing in a high stress situation,” he said.Lying motionless and exposing vulnerable body parts to a predator is risky, and so researchers from the University of Belgrade hypothesized that the more dramatic the show, the less time snakes would have to spend in danger.To test this, the researchers traveled to Golem Grad, an island in a lake in North Macedonia, where the snakes are common.There, they grabbed hold of 263 of the nonvenomous dice snakes and pinched them with their fingers to simulate the actions of a predator, before releasing each snake and timing its subsequent behavior as it feigned death.They observed that some snakes played dead by leaving their mouth wide open, some smeared themselves with poop and others oozed blood from their mouth, too.The 28 snakes that bled from the mouth spent two seconds less on average feigning their death, the study found, though some snakes that didn’t unleash …
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnEditor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.Awards season may be over for human actors this year, but there’s no rest for some of nature’s most audacious thespians.Dice snakes can fake their own death when being attacked by predators, putting on a theatrical display that includes smearing themselves with their own poop and letting blood ooze from their mouths.Researchers examined three colors of dice snake in North Macedonia. – Jozef KautAnd dice snakes that use these extra dramatic effects spend less time feigning their own deaths, and consequently less time in a dangerous situation, than their counterparts that don’t use this strategy, a study published on Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters found.Many different animals fake their own death as a defense mechanism against predators, with examples seen among insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, but just how – and to what degree – it works is still unclear.“There are conflicting theories about the origin of death feigning,” Vukašin Bjelica, a research associate at the University of Belgrade in Serbia and one of the study’s authors, told CNN via email.“Some say it is a conscious response while others are adamant it is not. One theory is that it is the ‘most primitive’ defense response, similar to freezing in a high stress situation,” he said.Lying motionless and exposing vulnerable body parts to a predator is risky, and so researchers from the University of Belgrade hypothesized that the more dramatic the show, the less time snakes would have to spend in danger.To test this, the researchers traveled to Golem Grad, an island in a lake in North Macedonia, where the snakes are common.There, they grabbed hold of 263 of the nonvenomous dice snakes and pinched them with their fingers to simulate the actions of a predator, before releasing each snake and timing its subsequent behavior as it feigned death.They observed that some snakes played dead by leaving their mouth wide open, some smeared themselves with poop and others oozed blood from their mouth, too.The 28 snakes that bled from the mouth spent two seconds less on average feigning their death, the study found, though some snakes that didn’t unleash …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
