Humans as well as most animals eat chew food before taking it down their throat to make the digestion process easier. Gulping the food whole will only put extreme burden on your stomach and you will most likely have upset stomach. This is true for most animals, including snakes.

Snakes are known for gulping their prey, such as toads and mice. But a blind species of snakes breaks the head of its pretty prior to swallowing it. The snake then swallows the body of its prey except the head. Then the snake rubs hits the head of its prey against a hard surface until separated from the body. In about 3 seconds or so, the prey is in inside the snake but the head is left uneaten.

According to the research study published in the popular Journal of Zoology, these snakes cut off the heads of 50% of their termites. This is an unexpected and unusual eating behavior of a snake, says the Takafumi Mizuno’s author in Japan.

They researchers further discovered that the snake took the same amount of time eating the prey with or without the head. There can be two reasons for this behaviors, they proposed: the head of the prey could contain toxic chemicals, or the snake just wants to save room in its gut because the head of its prey is indigestible.

Generally, blind snakes always try to cut off the head of its termites, states Mizuno. However, it is harder for the reptile to do so. Therefore, their decapitation rate is just 50%. It’s is still interesting that they seem to always make an attempt to eat the whole prey but its head. Most of the documentries shown on Discovery and National Geographic show snakes attacking animals and eating them whole, but this species is someway unique.

While reptiles rarely tear their prey apart before eating, two species of crab-eating snakes from Asia break off the legs its prey prior to gulp them. The ancestors of these two species were around about 100 million years back, the researchers claim.

The research is still on to find out how many other species of blink snakes show off the same behavior. An entire library could be filled up with what we don’t know as to these blind snakes, comments Andrew Durso of Utah State University.

He further says that it is exciting to know these the researchers discovered new things about these snakes that make this species stand out from the crowd from more than 3,000 snake species.

The rest of 400 species of blind snakes may have similar eating behavior. An interesting thing about this species is that all of the snakes in this species are female, and are called parthenogens. In other words, they have virgin births.

Snakes are terrific and they look even more terrific while gulping down an prey larger than their own size. But seeing a snake hitting their prey against something is a bizarre yet terrific experience.