Burmese pythons and other carnivorous snakes are well-known for swallowing their prey whole. But what comes out the other end doesn’t resemble what went in.
There’s not a bone to be seen in their poop. The secret? A specialized type of cell in the snake’s intestine that collects nuggets of calcium and phosphorus from the prey’s bones around an iron core, scientists reported in a paper published in the July Journal of Experimental Biology. These excess bits of ex-bone are then smoothly excreted.
Snakes like Burmese pythons (Python molurus bivittatus) are “intermittent feeders,” says Jehan-Hervé Lignot, an ecophysiologist at the University of Montpellier in France. “They are waiting for