A man was fascinated when he came across a snake that strangled itself to death.
He was so gobsmaked by what he’d witnessed that he shared it on Reddit in a subreddit called “interestingasf**k.” Attaching two pictures of the wrangling reptile, he added the caption: “Yesterday I found a snake which was strangling himself, after 10 minutes he died.”
The post quickly went viral earning 74k upvotes and attracting thousands of comments, puns and memes. One person wrote: “Me at any minor inconvenience.”
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“Very easy to strangle yourself when you’re all neck,” added another, to which one replied: “And all strangler.”
(Image: Getty Images/Westend61)
Another joked: “That’s a reptile dysfunction,” as someone else quipped: “Auto erotic assssssssphyxiation.”
One person chipped in saying: “Suicide. Must be due to a toxic and venomous environment.”
One added: “People taking pics instead of calling suicide hotline.”
“He looked a little rattled,” piped up another.
But while some questioned why the man observed the snake’s desperate plight without doing anything to help, many agreed they wanted to know what was going on.
“Was he suicidal or just plain feaky? We need answers!” one demanded.
Someone who seemed to be in the know replied: “Mating behavior…He smelled his own pheromones thinking his tail was another male. Being a constrictor, well, he constricted but ended up killing himself.”
But another remarked: “That’s a colubrid snake, not a constrictor. What you witnessed was the snake writhing in agony as it died, desperately holding into something with its tail for stability. It did not choke itself to death. It may have suffered a traumatic injury or been poisoned.”
Another theory was offered up by one person who said: “Stress, overheating and poor eyesight, particularly when shedding, can make a snake disoriented and confused, and more likely to strike at itself — or even self-cannibalize, according to IFLScience.”
According to good old Google, Serpentine Autoasphyxiation Syndrome (SAS) is a rare but fatal disorder that can cause snakes to inadvertently constrict their own bodies, leading to asphyxiation and death. This unusual behavior is believed to stem from a genetic mutation affecting the snake’s central nervous system.
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