No gag reflex asian1/23/2024 ![]() ![]() But Fleur Ponton from Macquarie University found that even when the crickets are eaten by a fish or a frog, which happens often, the horsehair worms can still escape from the guts of their host’s predator. Once the insects have drowned, the worms wriggle out. They are mind-controlling parasites that infect crickets, derange them, and drive them to suicidally leap into water. Horsehair worms probably have their own adaptations against being swallowed. After all, they’re burrowers-well-adapted to dark, constrictive, oxygen-poor environments, with tightly interlaced scales that could ward off, say, a toad’s digestive acids. ![]() As far as we know, their native range doesn’t usually include toad butts, but O’ Shea suspects that they might be uniquely qualified to survive in such an unusual locale. With a habit of stowing away in flowerpots, Brahminy blind snakes have become the most widespread snake on the planet. The snake survived for several hours, but died overnight. He eventually captured the two and separated them. “When the toad hopped to escape, the blind snake was carried along with it,” O’Shea wrote. After presumably being swallowed (perhaps because of its wormlike appearance), it somehow crawled through the toad’s entire gut, like some kind of serpentine Andy Dufresne. And wriggling out of the toad’s rear end was a Brahminy blind snake-a tiny serpent that looks like an earthworm. Beneath the rock was a common Asian toad. In 2012, on an expedition to East Timor, Mark O’ Shea picked up a rock to prop open the door of his laboratory. There are many stories of animals that have successfully broken out of a predator’s digestive tract (although tales of humans doing so have been disputed). Most of these liberated beetles can live for at least two more weeks after their escape. You can see one of them ignominiously crawling away to freedom in the video below. The beetles must also have adaptations that allow them to survive for 45 minutes inside a toad’s stomach, smothered in acidic mucus. If Sugiura and Sato forced them to exhaust their defensive sprays by provoking them with forceps, before offering them to the toads, almost all of them were eaten and digested. ![]() It’s not that the beetles are toxic in their own right. Their only option is to turn their stomachs inside-out-a process that takes around 45 minutes. Toads have no gag reflex, though, so they can’t vomit in the same way that we can. The chemicals were never fatal, but they were unpleasant enough to force many of the toads to regurgitate the beetles. The beetles may have been taken by surprise, but they still managed to unleash their payloads from inside their attackers’ stomachs. “However,” the duo write, “an explosion was audible inside each toad.” That’s certainly what Shinji Sugiura and Takuya Sato from Kobe University saw when they put the two animals together. But toads can project their sticky tongues so quickly that they can snag a bombardier beetle before it gets a chance to unleash hell. That’s enough to ward off most predators. The beetles can create around 500 of these explosions every second, creating chemical streams that reach over 100 degrees Celsius and travel at up to 22 miles per hour. Together, they react with explosive results. They do so by mixing chemicals housed in two separate glands. There are 500 species of them, named for their ability to spray scalding, caustic liquid from their backsides. They will sometimes puke up a meal, but since they constrict their victims before swallowing, the expelled individual would be very much dead.īut some animals can travel down a predator’s gullet and return to tell the tale. Chief among them: Anacondas do not regurgitate their still-living prey to experience the thrill of a second kill, as the movie’s snake does with Jon Voight. In the 1997 movie Anaconda, there are, to put it mildly, a few scientific inaccuracies. ![]()
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