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Mark Laita composed a series of photographs of dangerous snakes from across the world. My favorite image is this one of the rhinoceros viper, a snake found in West and Central Africa.
Link -via My Modern Met | Photographer’s Website
If you can do this, make sure that you put it on your resume because the ability to shove snakes into your nose and then pull them out of your mouth is not a common one. It is, however, a highly sought-after skill, as performer Liu Fei has no doubt discovered.
Link -via Geekosystem
Meet Koun Samang. When he was only three months old, his father found a python curled up in his crib. The dad removed the snake from the house, but it showed up again. It was released back in the jungle and then it came back again. It happened a total of three times before the Koun’s dad finally gave up and just let the snake hang out with his baby. Seven years later, the kid and the snake (now over 20 feet long) are best friends.
Of course, that’s not the only bizarre animal/human story friendship story. Cracked has five more and they are all equally fascinating.
Lizards aren’t particularly well known for their powers of friendship, but if I was a gecko, I’d certainly want to hang out with this guy, who is willing to risk his own life to save his friend.
Via Geekosystem
If you want to class up your home for visitors, say, prospective in-laws, then this snake wreath should do the trick. The best part is that there’s a motion sensor that makes the snakes move and hiss as people approach it. Link -via OhGizmo! | Photo: grandinroad
While this picture is already enough for most people to realize this is something no one should ever do,the fact that there is actually a record for most rattlesnakes held in the mouth at one time is just plain wrong. For more bizarre records, check out this great article over at All That is Interesting.
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YouTube user rachelgfisher was driving down the highway when her husband noticed that a snake slithered out from under the hood. He identified it as a water moccasin, a poisonous snake common to the southeastern United States. The snake moved over the windshield and onto the driver side mirror. It looks like it was trying to get into the cabin for safety, but those mean humans denied it entry. -via Joe Carter
Photographer Guido Mocafico takes pictures of snakes, but it wasn’t always so. He was once deathly afraid of them!
The first time I photographed a snake up close, I nearly fainted. I’d always found them terrifying, but also fascinating—an attraction-repulsion I think most people experience when they encounter beautiful animals that creep or crawl. My goal with this series is to explore that intersection of human emotions.
Shown are three colorful bush vipers of the same species. See a collection of Mocafino’s snake portraits at National Geographic. Link
(Image credit: Guido Mocafico/Hamiltons Gallery)
Well, it’s Thursday, so it’s time to clean out the cobra pit. Come’on, punch the timeclock and get to work. I’m not paying you to stand around all day.
via Nerdcore
Photographer Bence Máté snapped this amazing shot in Costa Rica. He writes:
I was photographing hummingbirds when I heard the sharp, alarming noise of the birds reacting to the presence of a predator. Sixty feet away from me this green-crowned brilliant was fearlessly attacking a small viper. The long shutter speed and shallow depth of field made it difficult to make an image with both animals sharp. This encounter was one of the most interesting ones I had ever seen, and I quickly set up two flashes to increase the light and shutter speed, using one flash fired from the background and another from the camera.
This image was among the winners of the 2010 Nature’s Best Photography Competition. It and other winners will be on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. starting in April.
Link via reddit | Artist’s Website | Exhibit Website
The paradise tree snake (Chrysopelea paradisi) can glide over long distances. It does so in order to jump from tree to tree in its native habitat. Jake Socha of Virginia Tech dropped snakes from a 15-meter tower in order to examine this ability under controlled conditions:
Rather than a smooth, even glide (known as equilibrium gliding, as executed by airborne birds), these snakes seemed to slither frenetically through the air. But all of their thrashing worked to reduce their fall speed (from about six meters per second to four meters per second) and gliding angle (from 32-48 degrees to 18-32 degrees).
“The snake is pushed upward—even though it is moving downward—because the upward component of the aerodynamic force is greater than the snake’s weight,” Socha said in a prepared statement. The new research suggests that the snakes’ soaring might be due to specifically tuned undulations which could create vortex-induced lift, Socha and his colleagues noted in a study, to be published November 24 in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.
Previously: Jake Socha’s Flying Paradise Tree Snake
Two scientists placed human subjects and snakes inside a MRI machine to measure how the human body responds to fear. Scientific American reports how they did it, and why:
You are in an MRI machine. Your head is fixed in a round cage. Your body is rolled into a narrow tube. Magnetic pulses are beamed into your brain. A meter-and-a-half-long snake is strapped with Velcro atop a small box on a conveyor belt just inches behind your head. Your eyes meet the snake’s beady gaze through a tiny mirror above your head. You can’t move.
Why would Uri Nili and Yadin Dudai, two scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, want to put a snake in the MRI scanner with you? Obviously, not to scan the snake’s brain (although this might be an interesting possibility). They wanted to scan your brain while you perform an act of courage. They wanted to push research on fear one step further – from understanding how we passively react to fear, through actively avoiding it, to actually confronting it.
The subject could choose to move the snake closer or farther away in increments that the researchers called “snake-advance units”. As the subject altered the relative position of the snake, instruments examined changes in his/her body.
Link | Video (self-starting) | Photo by Flickr user RussBowling used under Creative Commons license
On its face, April Fools’ Day seems like a lighthearted opportunity to play practical jokes and pranks on your friends and coworkers, but it’s easy to see the problem with having such a wacky day filled with falsities and gags. Namely, what happens when something of real consequence actually takes place on April 1st, but people don’t believe it because they automatically think it’s a prank? Here’s a few true tales of actual events that occurred on April 1st that were anything but gags.
Google is known for announcing ridiculous news stories, such as telepathic search engines and job openings on the moon, on April Fools’ Day. The thing is, when you are known for this sort of tom foolery, it makes it difficult to be taken seriously when you have real news on April 1st.
Humorously enough, the company has decided to take advantage of the viral marketing people give to the news they announce that day, so they have actually made announcements for real products and services at the same time. In 2004 (the same year they created job listings for the moon), they announced the release of Gmail. While this may not seem all that funny, many people still thought it was a prank because the idea of a mail service with one full gigabyte of storage seemed preposterous –at the time, Hotmail only offered 2 megabytes. They followed the success of this announcement by announcing the increase of the mail service’s storage to two gigabytes the next year, also on April Fools’ Day.
In a company that plays such major pranks on the nation every year, it seems likely that the employees must play some really great jokes on each other come April 1st. As such, when an employee’s pet ball python escaped its enclosure on the holiday, the news was met with some disbelief. Unfortunately, this time the news was real. An email was sent out to the entire staff that started out, “The timing of this email could not be more awkward.” It then moved on to say:
“Tempting as it might be, this is not an April Fool’s joke! We are sending this message to alert you to the situation and to let you know what to do in the event you see the snake. “
At least the sender recognized the humor of the situation. In case you were worried about the critter, he was eventually found and returned to his owner’s house a few days later.
Image via Char1iej [Flickr]
Whereas Google has mastered the art of cleverly announcing real news on April Fools’ Day in order to play with the minds of the public, CBS obviously has a lot to learn about making serious announcements on April 1st. Last year, they infuriated a number of loyal viewers by announcing the cancellation of the seventy-two year old daytime soap Guiding Light on April Fools’ Day. As one angry commenter wrote on TV Squad:
“If it’s true, you’re jerks for announcing it today. And if it’s not true, then everyone who believes you was a jerk for believing such a story on April Fools’ Day.”
Unfortunately, not all real news on April Fools’ Day is as minor as a lost python or canceled TV show. There are many situations where people do not believe a person has died, simply because of the date. Unfortunately, the three best examples of this are all so strange that it’s not surprising that people believed the news to be a hoax.
In 1984, one day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye was murdered by his own father after intervening in an argument between his parents. Many fans refused to believe the news because it seemed so odd that his dad would have been the murderer. It wasn’t until the news was confirmed officially that many people stopped believing the murder was more than a cruel April Fools’ Day joke.
Surprisingly, Marvin Senior was only found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to five years imprisonment because his son beat him before the shooting.
If you heard a NASCAR champion nicknamed “The Polish Prince” died in a Hooters corporate plane on April Fools’ Day, would you believe it? A lot of fans thought they were hearing a bad joke in 1993 when racing star Alan Kulwicki was announced to be dead in exactly those circumstances.
Image via jbspec7 [Flickr]
Is there a more fitting day for a comedian to die than April Fools’ Day? While Mitch Hedberg actually died on March 30, 2005, the news wasn’t spread to the media until very late on March 31st. Not surprisingly, many people thought the death was merely a prank or a bad publicity stunt put on by Mitch himself.
Perhaps the only situation that is worse than one person dying on April Fools’ Day is the so-called April Fools’ Tsunami of 1946, when over 100 people died, largely because they believed storm warnings were a joke. The incident occurred after an massive earthquake on the Aleutian Islands near Alaska, which caused a series of massive tidal waves that spread all the way to South America. Most of the damage hit Hawaii though, where the tsunami reached up to 45 feet tall. Unfortunately, because so many people doubted the news of the impending tidal wave and refused to evacuate, over 165 people died -159 of them in Hawaii.
Interestingly, perhaps this was a bit of a sick prank on the part of Mother Nature, because scientists are still unable to find any reason the 7.8 magnitude earthquake was able to launch such a massive tsunami. It was originally thought that the waves were intensified by a major underwater landslide in the area, but scientists have still found no evidence of this hypothetical landslide. One of the researchers who recently mapped the ocean floor looking for a landslide in the area summed up the matter by noting, “almost 60 years after the event, the 1946 tsunami is still making fools of all of us.”
What about you, readers? Have you ever thought something that happened on April 1st was actually a joke, only to find out later that it was actually 100% true?
If you have a serious phobia of frogs, rats, bees or snakes, you probably shouldn’t read WebEcoist’s article on the most invasive species in the world. On the other hand, if you don’t have any phobias, it’s fascinating to know just how devastating a pair of bunnies ended up being to Australia and how Florida and other areas of the South are being taken over by released and escaped Burmese pythons.
Most people, including myself, tend to avoid getting close up to snakes, photographer but Guido Mocafico sees the beauty in the animals and managed to photograph them in an amazing way that makes the rest of us able to appreciate them.
Leptotyphlops carlae was discovered by biologist Blair Hedges in a jungle on Barbados last year. It’s only four inches long as an adult and as thin as a strand of spaghetti.
Life imitated art on an Australian passenger plane when four snakes being transported on board escaped from captivity. No one was hurt, and the snakes were never found.
You know what would have made this story funnier? If Snakes on a Plane had been the in-flight movie.
