Snakes are notorious for their particular taste in rodents, but it appears that the kangaroo rat managed to evolve with adaptations that help it evade strikes made by predatory snakes.
In this video, you'll see a kangaroo rat utilize extreme agility skills to evade a strike from a snake. In as little as 50 milliseconds, the rodent performs its evasive maneuver. By pushing up from the ground with its super-long feet, it pulls a Tae-Kwon-Do-like move to defend itself against the serpent.
Not only does the rat jump up from the ground at high rates of speed, but it delivers a blow to the snake. In some cases, the rat disorients the snake by kicking up sand toward the serpent.
In what seems like a very unlikely victor in this kind of situation, it turns out that this behavior is quite typical among kangaroo rats.
California-based researchers set up night vision cameras to observe the behavior and found that kangaroo rats escape from striking snakes with these sorts of maneuvers almost 100% of the time. Out of all 23 attempts, only one snake was lucky enough to bite a kangaroo rat; even then, the rat still got away.
Kangaroo rats 1, snakes 0.
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OCT 12, 2017