100 Interesting Facts About Snakes

An Ancient Roman punishment for the crime of parricide (the killing of a parent) was to severely scourge the criminal, sew them into a stout leather bag with a dog, a snake, a rooster, and a monkey, then throw the bag into the river.

27. In 2000, a partially paralyzed 75-year-old named Coolidge Winesett from Southwest Virginia was in his outhouse pit when the floor of it suddenly gave way. He fell through and was surrounded with excrement, urine, snakes, spiders, maggots and rats. He was stuck and it was over 3 days before the mailman found him alive in the pit.

28. The Boa Constrictor is the only living animal which is commonly known by its full Latin name, boa constrictor. The only other example is the extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex.

29. The pressure in an erect penis is over 100 torr, more than what a boa constrictor uses to suffocate its prey.

30. The largest snake fossil ever discovered is called a Titanoboa. This creature lived 60 million years ago and would have been 50 feet (15 meters) long.

The Russell viper's bite can, in certain situations, make the victim go through a sort of reverse puberty.

32. When the English colonial government in Delhi, India put a bounty on cobras to eliminate them from the city, it resulted in a cobra population boom. The bounty was greater than the cost of breeding a cobra, and the citizens started breeding them to sell it to the government.

33. In Vietnam, it is possible to order a cobra blood wine from the restaurant menu. The waiter will take a live cobra, kill it on the spot, drain the blood into a shot glass of rice wine, and top it off with the cobra's still beating heart for you to gulp down.

34. In 2012, a Nepalese farmer named Mohammed Salmodin was bitten by a cobra and bit the cobra back. The cobra died and he went about his daily business with no symptoms as if nothing had happened. He finally agreed to go to the hospital after pressure from family, neighbors, and police.

35. The interior of spitting cobras' fangs have ridges like those inside a rifle's barrel that allow it to shoot venom further.

Before the invention of anti-venom, the black mamba had a 100% fatality rate and its victims would be dead in about 20 minutes.

37. On April 1, 2007, Google sent an email to its employees warning that a python was loose in its New York Office. It was not a joke.

38. If two rattlesnakes fight, they don’t use their fangs to poison the other.

39. In 2009, a Florida couple was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter of their daughter after their pet Burmese python escaped its cage and squeezed the two-year-old to death.

40. Rattlesnake antivenom costs $20,000 per vial. One Florida boy needed 75-80 vials, which adds up to about $1.6 million

The muscle that causes a rattlesnake to rattle fires 50 times a second for up to 3 hours or 520,000 rattles without stopping

42. A pastor died in 1983 after handling a timber rattlesnake during a Pentecostal service. About 29 years later his son died in the exact same way.

43. Anacondas mate in a giant "breeding ball" with 1 female and up to 12 males, and they stay in that position for over a month.

44. Up until the early 1900's, there was an extensive population of Rattlesnakes in the Bronx. They were wiped out when Farmers let their pigs hunt them.

45. European Hedgehogs actually hunt Adders tiring them out by chasing them and biting them many times, then breaking their necks when the Adders can't run anymore.

There have been 14 known fatalities in Britain from native adder bites since 1876. Recovery from a bite can take up to a year.

47. The Wildlife Conservation Society has, since the early 20th century, offered a large cash reward (currently worth US$50,000) for live delivery of any snake of 9 meters (30 ft) or more in length, but the prize has never been claimed, despite the numerous sightings of giant anacondas.

48. Sonoran Coral Snake, instead of hissing or rattling, farts when threatened

49. The northern copperhead snake smells like cucumbers

50. When a snake in the Tokyo Zoo was given a live hamster (as a meal), they two became "best friends."