scientist have honor Cuban feather boa delineate up , suspending themselves from cave ceiling in a “ curtain ” of bodies , and wait for their chiropteran prey to pilot through . A report on this never - before - seen behaviour was write in the journalAnimal Behavior and Cognition[PDF ] .
At 3 to 6 human foot long , the Cuban feather boa ( Chilabothrus angulifer ) is a hefty customer , the heavy in its genus and one of the biggest in the West Indies . It ’s a skilled Orion both on the woods base and the cave cap , swing like a fanged party banner and snapping hap yield bat out of the air .
Cooperative hunting is not rare in nature . beast do it , as do dolphins , apes , some bird , crocodile , and even afew species of Pisces . Snakes … not so much . scientist have seen snakes run in the same space , at the same time , but it was sort of an every - snake - for - itself berth . ( In that nightmare - inducing scene inPlanet Earth 2 , for instance , researchers viewed the snakes as coordinating , not cooperating . ) Or so we remember .
Yet when researcher Vladimir Dinets of the University of Knoxville settled in near a sink cave in Cuba ’s Desembarco del Granma National Park to watch the snakes ’ nightly bat - feast , he noticed something strange : The snakes seemed to be make room for one another .
For eight nights between sunset and cockcrow , an apparently fearless Dinets watched the cave ’s nine snake habitant position themselves on the roof of the cave . His first thought was that each snake in the grass just had its own favorite or assigned spot on the ceiling .
But over clip , he realized that they were rotating , each arriving snake filling in gaps in the curtain outer space to ensure maximal at-bat - flightpath coverage .
This was n’t just a bunch of snakes hunt in the same place at the same time . This was a bunch of serpent huntingtogether . And it was working . The boas stuffed themselves with little furry consistence .
“ It is possible that boas are not unique among snakes , and that unified hunt is not especially rarefied , ” Dinets write in his paper . “ This possibleness suggests that at least some snake in the grass are not the ‘ solitary fauna ’ they are commonly considered to be , and that they are capable of high behavioral complexness require for such hunting . ”
This is fine .
