Boa Constrictors Are Looking for a Pulse

A new paper published in Biology Letters reports that boa constrictors respond to their victims’ heartbeats during constriction, and adjust their coils and apply bursts of pressure until the heartbeats stopped. Now I’ve kept two boas who ate frozen/thawed mice (which don’t have much of a pulse); they constricted their dead prey for a good long while, more so than the colubrids did. But what these researchers found, using dead rats with simulated heartbeats, is that their boas, both wild-caught and captive-bred, constricted for a longer period of time, and made more coil adjustments, than they did with ordinary, pulseless, dead rats. Via Scientific American.