Snakes with super powers

Megan Lynn Mullins , Feature writer

The western diamondback rattlesnake lays silently in the bush awaiting it’s next prey. They can go up to two years without feeding, but when they decided that the time has come to feast the victim almost has to contain true super powers if they want to escape the venomous jaws of this fascinating creature.Their most valuable weapon is their speed and agility, a western diamondback rattlesnake care strike between the speeds of 44 and 70 milliseconds. It takes a human being 200 ms to blink their eye, in this time a snake could strike and pierce you on four different occasions. If we moved at the acceleration that snakes do we would black out. It is not just rattle snakes that can move at these incredible speeds, out of the 3,500 different snake species in the world that have been studied they all have the capability to move at these shocking speeds.
The reasoning for the snakes speeds comes down to their unique physiology. Snakes have incredibly large amounts of muscles the human body contains contains between 700 and 800 muscles. While even the smallest snakes still contain between 10,000 and 15,000 muscles. They believe that snakes connect all their muscles together and use them to spring forward in an elastic movement.
When snakes perform these striking movements they can experience up to 30g. The most highly trained of all fighter pilots lose control at 8g and lose consciousness at 10g. There are many other animals such as lizard with their tongues, who are able to strike one body part at an accelerated motion but none that are able to do so with their brain. A brains should simply not be able to withstand that kind of powerful acceleration but snakes are the exception.

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