Fully realizing that rattlesnakes must fulfill some sort of role in nature by virtue of their existence, let’s also add that they suck. They seem like they’re always ill-tempered and they bite and kill people as well as gruesomely swallowing innocent critters whole. Take this amazing footage brought to us by Huffpost.
One sneaky snake (no, not Taylor Swift) tried it by creeping up on what it thought was dinner (aka a poor defenseless kangaroo rat in the desert). That snake is now hissing out the other side of its face. It picked on the wrong ninja kangaroo rat!
Scientists tell us that rattlesnakes can launch a bite in 100 milliseconds. To illustrate how fast that is – a human blink takes 150 milliseconds. Kangaroo rats can normally use their super-sensitive hearing to sense a predator’s approach and evade being bitten. But if they’re not able to exit immediately, they go ninja with a kick that takes only 70 milliseconds, according to a biology professor at San Diego State University.
“But in perhaps the most surprising finding of our research, kangaroo rats that did not react quickly enough to avoid the strike had another trick up their sleeves: they often were able to avoid being envenomated by reorienting themselves in mid-air and using their massive haunches and feet to kick the snakes away, ninja-style.”
Kangaroo rats might not look like much but it turns out that they’re the badasses of the animal kingdom. Who knew?
Pic: YouTube