Watch the video here:
A large snake thought it was its lucky day when it caught a big lizard. However, as you’ll soon see, the snake seems to have bitten off more than it could chew.
Andre de Kock submitted this unusual footage to Latest Sightings. He witnessed the incident while on a game drive in South Africa’s Thornybush Private Game Reserve.
Hang on! What’s that?
As Anton’s video rolls, it presents a rather bizarre sight. A large snake is hanging upside down from the trunk of a tree.
Meanwhile, hanging from its jaws, we see that it has caught a large lizard. The snake in question is a snouted cobra, while the lizard is a rock monitor.
Hard to swallow
While we don’t know how it got into this position, we do know that snouted cobras frequently eat lizards. It is also unclear whether the lizard is dead or alive.
Whatever the case, the cobra has begun the laborious process of swallowing its oversized meal. Snakes swallow by “walking” their prey down their throats by alternating their grip from one side of the jaw to the other.
However, the snake is clearly struggling as the weight of the lizard is working against this mechanism. In fact, on closer inspection, we see that a large bulge around the lizard’s belly further hampers its efforts.
Awkward situation
The cobra repeatedly tries to lift the lizard upward, but, lacking a decent anchor point and a place to go with it, it fails. If it can only lift it into the cleft that it is hanging from, it might have a chance.
Still, try as it might, the monitor lizard is too heavy, and its position is not helping in the least. The obvious solution would be to drop to the ground, but for reasons unknown, the cobra does not do so.
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Final obstacle
As it happens, neither gravity nor position determined the outcome of this endeavour. According to Anton, after struggling for some time to ingest the lizard, the snake had to give up.
Ironically, it was not so much its position that proved the deciding factor. Instead, the snake was unable to get its mouth around the lizard’s hugely distended belly.
It looks like while the snake was swallowing, it inadvertently “squeezed” the lizard’s internal organs down into the lower abdomen.
Fate unknown
Because the video ends before the snake regurgitates its prey, we don’t know what happens afterwards.
However, while monitor lizards are not immune to snouted cobra venom, they are highly resistant to it due to specialized blood proteins that neutralize toxins.
Additionally, their heavy scales often protect them from envenomation, so if the snake’s fangs don’t penetrate through this armoured layer into tissue, they may escape relatively unharmed.
Their fate in these cases depends largely on whether envenomation was successful, and if so, how much venom was injected.
Snouted cobras
Also known as banded Egyptian cobras, these snakes possess a neurotoxic venom with cytotoxic properties. Despite being considered highly venomous, they are seldom responsible for bites to humans.