Author: Sarah Zielinski / Source: Science News
Studying the diet of snakes isn’t easy.
The animals are elusive, and they don’t feed all that often. It probably doesn’t help that some of them can be deadly to humans. So perhaps it’s not much of a surprise that scientists hadn’t realized how common one category of snack is for southern African cobras: each other. But once researchers started looking, they realized that cannibalism among cobras happens far more frequently than anyone had thought.Bryan Maritz, a herpetologist at the University of the Western Cape in Bellville, South Africa, hadn’t set out to study cobra cannibalism. He and his colleagues were conducting a study in the Kalahari Desert of two species of snakes: cape cobras and boomslang.
“The snakes raid these huge colonial social weaver nests and eat all the chicks and eggs,” Maritz says. The researchers want to better understand how the two species use the birds and their nests, and they were looking for snakes that they could implant with radio transmitters.
One day this past January, though, while searching for snakes, the researchers got a radio call from a tour guide who told them where to find a pair of large yellow snakes engaged in a fight. Thinking those yellow…
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