25 Kickass and Interesting Facts About Snakes – Part 2

Here is part 2 of 25 Kickass and Interesting Facts About Snakes.  For part 1, click here.

1-5 Interesting Facts About Snakes

1. In Vietnam, it is possible to order a cobra blood wine from 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. – Source

2. 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. – Source

3. The interior of spitting cobras’ fangs have ridges like those inside a rifle’s barrel that allow it to shoot venom further. – Source

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

5. 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. – Source

6-10 Interesting Facts About Snakes

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

7. 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. – Source

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

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

10. 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. – Source

11-15 Interesting Facts About Snakes

11. 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. – Source

12. 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. – Source

13. 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. – Source

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

15. 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. – Source

16-20 Interesting Facts About Snakes

16. Sonoran Coral Snake, instead of hissing or rattling, farts when threatened – Source

17. The northern copperhead snake smells like cucumbers – Source

18. When a snake in the Tokyo Zoo was given a live hamster (as a meal), they two became “best friends.” – Source

19. There are no snakes in New Zealand. – Source

20. The decapitated head of a dead snake can still bite hours after death. Because dead snakes can’t regulate how much venom they inject, such bites can often contain large amounts of venom. – Source

21-25 Interesting Facts About Snakes

21. Brown tree snakes, when inadvertently introduced to Guam from the Solomon Islands, have eaten the entire island population of native birds and bats. To combat the population of snakes, the government has dropped dead mice packed with Tylenol into Guam’s dense jungle canopy. – Source

22. Ball pythons are treated with great care when they happen to wander into a Nigerian village. They are allowed to roam freely or gently picked up and placed out in a forest or field. If one is accidentally killed, many towns build a coffin for the snake’s remains and give it a short funeral. – Source

23. The largest Chinese restaurant in the world seats 5,000 people, employs more than 300 chefs, and goes through 700 chickens and 200 snakes in a week. – Source

24. 50,000 people a year die from snakebites, but only about 5 die in Australia, where the deadliest snakes live. – Source

25. The heads of a two-headed snakes fight over food if vision of each other is not blocked while being fed. – Source