They then wrap their body around the crab and bite it, sometimes pulling off individual legs, before downing the whole thing.

They found that the white-bellied mangrove snakes also have a very strange attacking method, striking at crabs with a closed mouth, pinning them down into the mud. The researchers also examined the eating habits of two related species, the white-bellied mangrove snake ( Fordonia leucobalia) and Cantor's water snake ( Cantoria violacea), which respectively eat hard-shelled crabs and snapping shrimp. It's a risky lifestyle: 'If the snakes are small enough, and attack a hard-shell crab instead of a softshell crab, instead of getting dinner, they may become dinner,' he says. When they placed freshly molted crabs in the tanks, the snakes would 'zoom right out of the burrow, and instead of moving slowly, their heads would trash back and forth,' and then they'd attack, Jayne says. With the help of Peter Ng, a crab specialist at the University of Singapore, the researchers acquired a large collection of the prey animals, so that they would have some freshly molted specimens. WATCH: Southern African python mothers care for their young, a behavior observed in no other egg-laying snakes, reports South Africa's Wits University. If cat-eyed water snakes were similar, it would explain why some crabs recovered from inside the stomach of snakes they captured in the wild appeared squishy, perhaps from being newly molted rather than being partially digested. This North American creature prefers to prey upon freshly molted crayfish, snacking on the animals when they are softer and easier to swallow. Why werenвЂ™t the snakes feeding? The colleagues remained stumped until Jayne came upon a clue from an unrelated animal, the queen snake ( Regina septemvittata). When they initially put crabs on top the mud, the animals showed no interest. It took many years for Jayne to record this 'most un-snake-like behavior.' After capturing cat-eyed water snakes in Malaysia, and later Singapore, Jayne and colleagues took some into the lab and placed them in mud-bottom tanks where the creatures formed tunnels and stayed put. 'They are doing things that snakes are not supposed to do,' says Alan Savitzky, a herpetologist at Utah State University who wasn't involved in the study. Next they eat the individual pieces, or if the carapace is still too big, sometimes they just pull off the legs and eat them one by one, Jayne says. They then make a loop with their body, pulling the prey through it repeatedly until the crab is deformed or breaks apart, Jayne explains. Their strange feeding style begins with a bite, and a tight grasp of the crab's main body, or carapace. ( Read about which snake is the fiercest of them all.) 'They are quite the little gourmands,' says study leader Bruce Jayne, a professor of biology at the University of Cincinnati. Picky eaters, they only go after freshly molted crabs in the 10-to-15-minute period after the animals shed their old shells, according to the study, published recently in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

Almost all known snake species eat their prey whole, in a single and sometimes monumental gulp.Д«ut scientists have found an exception to this general rule in the cat-eyed water snake ( Gerarda prevostiana), a small serpent native to mangrove swamps throughout Southeast Asia.ДЄ new study has found that these snakes will attack and eat crabs up to five times larger than their jaw can accommodate.

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