What are the unexpected differences between poisonous snakes and non-poisonous snakes?

What is the difference between poisonous snakes and non-poisonous snakes? Can a snake haunt people? Up to now, humans have discovered more than 3, kinds of snakes, and a large part of them are non-poisonous snakes (about 1,5 kinds or more). As the name implies, from the perspective of body structure, the biggest difference between poisonous snakes and non-poisonous snakes is whether there are poisonous gland structures in the body. Because non-venomous snakes don't have the venom that can directly kill other creatures, there are obvious differences between them in attack and defense.

what are the characteristics that can be used as the distinguishing points between poisonous snakes and five poisons?

as mentioned earlier, there are thousands of kinds of snakes, but we can roughly distinguish them according to whether they are toxic or not. If you are not a professional snake research expert and farmer, ordinary people generally don't know the basis for judging whether snakes are poisonous:

Escape speed: Although all snakes (reptiles) have degraded their limbs, when poisonous snakes find humans, they often take advantage of their fast crawling speed to escape quickly;

Appearance characteristics: the head of non-venomous snakes is mostly oval, and the color of its "back area" is often dim, and it has a tail (slender) that gradually tapers backwards from the anal position; However, the head of poisonous snakes is often triangular, and the color and tail characteristics of "body back position" are completely opposite to those of non-poisonous snakes, with a brightly colored body back and a short and thick tail;

body softness: usually, when we catch a snake with our bare hands, we will find that if it feels soft when touching the snake's body, it is often a poisonous snake. The bodies of those non-venomous snakes are generally tough to touch, and this way of identification is probably only experienced by professionals;

Tooth structure and number: Generally speaking, there are poisonous snakes with fangs (located in the upper collar bone) and poisonous glands, which are connected at the base (except for red snake). Non-poisonous snakes grow more teeth, including pterygoid teeth, jaw teeth, lower collar teeth and upper collar teeth, but since non-poisonous snakes have no poisonous glands, these teeth are all poisonous;

Physical reaction after biting: In short, people bitten by non-venomous snakes generally don't have too much bleeding, and the pain doesn't last long. Generally, there is no swelling or only slight redness, and there is no numbness in body perception. However, if you are bitten by a poisonous snake, you are likely to face life-threatening. For example, many people call the Hundred-step Snake and the Five-step Snake. If you are bitten by them, you will face terrible consequences of bleeding. In fact, what they refer to is "Agkistrodon acutus", and the number of steps is just what people use to describe its extremely rapid toxic diffusion time.

Just as many other things are difficult to be clearly defined, there are the same problems in distinguishing poisonous snakes from non-poisonous snakes. For example, some snakes, such as "Agkistrodon", although they belong to non-poisonous snakes from the perspective of classification, their mouths will secrete a foreign body harmful to human body, which is why there is still controversy about whether they are toxic or not.

Moreover, when we judge whether "a snake" is poisonous, we must not distinguish it only by its appearance. Because, not all poisonous snakes have triangular features on their heads, such as coral snakes; The "neck snake", which is often mistaken for a poisonous snake, is actually misjudged because its head presents an inverted triangle; Bright-colored snakes like corn snakes are not poisonous snakes, while Agkistrodon whose color is similar to that of soil is very toxic.

in short, the basis for distinguishing the appearance of poisonous snakes and non-poisonous snakes is only applicable to most of these populations. Therefore, we regard whether a snake has fangs and glands as the main basis for judging whether there are poisonous snakes or not.

can a snake haunt people?

In fact, snakes are divided into poisonous snakes and non-poisonous snakes, so there are obvious differences in their attack and defense methods. For example, for the black cobra known as the "shadow of death", although it only needs to shoot two drops of venom, it can completely kill one in 2 minutes. However, because of their particularly bad temper, they will repeatedly attack people or prey who think they pose a threat to themselves.

But for non-venomous snakes, they mainly take two ways to hunt their prey, namely, subduing the prey and swallowing it, and choking it to death by winding it. There is no doubt that both ways of dying are creepy. Judging from these two attack methods, it is required that there is a certain difference in size between the prey and the snake itself, otherwise it will be very difficult to entangle and swallow raw. Then, I checked the figure data of non-poisonous snakes, and it was not unexpected.

It turns out that the body length of most non-venomous snakes can reach the range of 5 to 2 cm, which also confirms the matching of their body shape and attack mode. Therefore, snakes that usually attack humans by winding are usually non-venomous. Whether a snake can kill people by winding depends mainly on how well the attacked person knows the snake, whether he is good at catching the snake, and how strong the snake's own attack power is, while the latter involves the size and reaction speed of the snake.

Of course, for some large special poisonous snakes, they may not directly hold the venom to kill the target object. For example, that boa constrictor living in the Amazon basin, whose mind is meticulous and their personality is not as reckless as that of the black tree cobra, always wait for an opportunity to bite their prey and then strangle it with their bodies. A large boa constrictor can even swallow a crocodile. But what is certain is that it is difficult for a smaller non-poisonous snake to entangle a person to death, while a poisonous snake can kill people through venom even if it is not entangled.

Is it really feasible to kill snakes?

For most ordinary people, snakes are undoubtedly a frightening creature, which is why many people have made comments on killing snakes on the Internet. However, how many people know that snakes are actually one of the most successful carnivores on earth. The time when human beings were born on the earth is only a few million years, and snakes have already experienced a long evolutionary process of more than 13 million years. They appeared in this world earlier than humans.

Although snakes are originally warm animals, their life habit of "liking warmth and fearing cold" determines that they are mainly distributed in subtropical and tropical regions. But in fact, snakes themselves are an important part of the earth's biological resources, including the earth's environment on which we human beings depend, and they are also inseparable from the existence of snakes. Killing snakes not only involves the extinction of the biological group itself, but also has a great impact on the ecological balance of the earth.