When two snakes fight, it can be hard to work out who’s winning. “They’re both wound together, just two tubes wrestling,” says David Penning , from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. But if one of the combatants is a kingsnake, then all you have to do is wait. The kingsnake will be the one left slithering.
These animals get their name because they specialize in killing other snakes. They’ll take rodents, lizards, and birds as well, but snakes account for a quarter of their diet. They do so by constriction—wrapping their coils around their opponent and squeezing so hard that they trigger cardiac arrest [+] The kingsnake will launch itself at, say, a ratsnake, bite it, and throw some coils around. Then it inches its way toward the victim’s head, alternating between shifting its bite and adding more coils. The ratsnake tries to escape, but almost never does. Penning has now watched hundreds of these bouts, and “it never ever seemed like the kingsnake is in trouble,” he says. Unless it’s a juvenile that has inadvisedly picked on a target several times its size, it always wins. And, to Penning, that made no sense.
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