Easy Lunch for Fish-Tricking Snake

June 24, 2009 — -- Kenneth Catania has a new weirdo to add to his collection -- a fish-eating snake that is so clever it can trick its prey into swimming right into its mouth.

Catania is a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University who is becoming a bit of a legend in his field because he specializes in figuring out why some animals are just so strange. Like the star-nosed mole that is ugly enough to scare its own mother.

Why pay so much attention to the strangest of animals?

"What makes these animals so strange is their extreme specialization, and for that very reason, there is a great deal that we can learn from studying them," Catania says.

There's a reason why the hamster-sized star nose mole has a snout with 11 pairs of pink appendages that form a fleshy star. The mole, rarely seen by humans because it lives in marshes, uses its ugly nose to feel differences in textures down to the microscopic level.

Catania has shown that the mole's nose has 25,000 microscopic sensor receptors and 100,000 nerve fibers that run from the nose to the brain, more than six times the number that connect the human hand and brain. That apparently is why the nearly blind rodent approaches the theoretical maximum speed for locating and consuming food, according to his research.

Why should anyone care? Because there are striking similarities between the mole's sensitive nose and the human visual system, he said, so if we learn a lot about the star-nosed mole we may learn something more about ourselves.

But Catania, who received the MacArthur "genius" award in 2006 for his fascination and exploration of nature's oddballs, has more recently focused his attention on the amazing tentacled snake of South East Asia. It's the only snake with two short tentacles on its nose, and he wanted to know why they were there.

Using a high speed video camera (he is also an accomplished photographer) Catania documented a talent he has seen in no other animals. He conducted 120 trials with four different snakes. In 78 percent of the time, the prey turned and swam right into the snake's mouth instead of fleeing.