How boas save themselves from suffocation when constricting and digesting dinner
Brown University
Saccular ventilation: When the vascular region was restricted, the saccular region behaved like a bellows, pulling air through the front and supplying the body with oxygen.
This won’t bring much comfort to a boa constrictor’s
unlucky victims, but eating dinner puts the snake in a bit of a bind. The
mechanics of squeezing a creature to death and then swallowing it whole create
pressure on the boa’s ribs and lungs, restricting their ability to fill their
lungs with oxygenated air.
Yet
snakes have clearly overcome — some might even say mastered — the challenges of
breathing while eating, and researchers have finally figured out how. A study
published in Journal of
Experimental Biology explains how boa constrictors are able to
adjust which region of the ribcage they use to inhale, depending on whether
they are resting, constricting or digesting.
“By showing how snakes were able to circumvent the mechanical constraints of constriction and large prey ingestion — the very things that helped distinguish them from other limbless elongate animals — this study provides a new perspective on snake evolution,” said John Capano, lead study author, who received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 2021 and is now a postdoctoral research associate in lab of Matt Fuxjager, a Brown associate professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology.
Snakes
don’t have diaphragms, so they rely entirely on the motions of their ribs to
breathe, Capano said. To quantify individual rib motions, Capano and Elizabeth
Brainerd, a Brown professor of biology and medical science, used a 3D imaging
technology developed at Brown
University called X-ray reconstruction of moving
morphology (XROMM),
which can show the rapid skeletal movement of live creatures.
XROMM combines 3D models of bone morphology with movement data from x-ray
video to create highly accurate re-animations of the bones moving in space (for
example: birds flying, frogs jumping — and snakes breathing).
In
the experiments, Capano and Brainerd secured a blood pressure cuff around the
ribs of boa constrictors to restrict their movements. Capano attached tiny
metal markers to two ribs in each reptile — one set of markers a third of the
way down the snake’s body and another halfway along — to visualize how the ribs
moved using X-rays. Then he positioned a blood pressure cuff over the ribs in
both regions and gradually increased the pressure to prevent the ribs from
moving.
Some
of the snakes reacted to the feeling of the cuff by hissing defensively, thus
filling their lungs with air and expanding their ribs “Hissing provided us with
an opportunity to measure some of the biggest breaths snakes take,” Capano
said.
Reconstructing the boa constrictors’ rib movements, it was clear that the animals were able to control the movements of ribs in different portions of the rib cage independently. When the boa constrictors were gripped by the blood pressure cuff a third of the way along the body, the animals breathed using the ribs further back.
However, when the ribs toward the rear of the lung were constricted, the snakes breathed using the ribs closer to the head. In fact, the ribs at the far end of the lung only moved when the forward ribs were gripped, drawing air deep into the posterior section of lung, even though this further back region has a poor blood supply and cannot uptake oxygen into the body.
The researchers discovered that the far end of the lung (known as the saccular region) behaved like a bellows, pulling air through the front section of the lung (the vascular region) when that area wasn’t able to do its job. In this way, they were able to continue to supply the body with oxygen even when the vascular region couldn’t ventilate itself.
In control experiments in which no pressure was
applied to the vascular region, snakes continued to breathe using rib motions in
this area.
In
addition, Capano, with Scott Boback and Charles Zwemer from Dickinson College,
recorded the nerve signals controlling the muscles that moved the ribs during
different behaviors. Boback also filmed a snake with a GoPro camera as it
dined. The researchers found that the snake could turn off the nerve signals to
the muscles in both the front and back part of the lung; the snakes were able
to shift where they to breathed by activating a different set of ribs further
along the body.
Vascular breathing
When the the boas' saccular region was restricted, the animals breathed using the front vascular region — as they do when at rest.
The
researchers found multiple lines of evidence in support of their hypothesis
that boa constrictors actively modulate the trunk segments and ribs used for
lung ventilation in response to hindered rib motions. They also confirmed that
during prey ingestion, boa constrictors breathed with segments that were not
full of food, shifting the sections they used as the prey moved through their
digestive system.
Because
subduing and digesting a victim requires a lot of energy (and thus oxygen), the
researchers concluded that the snakes likely adapted their sectional-breathing
style before they evolved to take on larger prey.
Capano
said that these findings help explain how snakes have been able to adapt to a
wide diversity of habitats, develop into countless species and proliferate.
“Snakes
are, by far, one of most widespread and adaptable predators on the planet, yet
the fact that they’ve managed to become so successful within the confines of an
elongate, limbless body is quite remarkable — especially considering that this
body type has limited the diversity and range of other similarly shaped
vertebrates,” Capano said.
Evolving
the ability to constrict and ingest large prey drastically expanded snakes’
meal options beyond the small insects consumed by most elongate vertebrates.
However, Capano said, “we suggest that constriction and eating massive prey
could not have evolved to such extreme and effective levels without modular
lung ventilation.”
Additional
contributors to this study include Hannah I. Weller from Brown University and
Robert L. Cieri from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia.
This
research was supported by the National Science Foundation (1655756, 1661129)
and Sigma Xi (G20160315024996 and G2017100190748016).