Just because a snake can’t kill you doesn’t mean it’s slow on the draw. New research shows that harmless snakes strike just as quickly as venomous vipers do. The snakes hurl themselves at their targets so quickly, in fact, that a lesser animal would black out from the acceleration.
Vipers have long been the presumed titleholders for strike speed, explains David Penning, a graduate student in biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. These snakes strike to kill, plunging their venom-injecting fangs into a rat or lizard before it can react. But no one has thoroughly tested the assumption that vipers are the fastest, Penning says.
