3 Tentacled Sea Snakes

National Geographic

They say it's better to pull a bandage off quickly, rather than slowly pull out every arm hair individually. So let's just get this over with as quick as possible: There are psychic snakes.

Those are real things that really exist, and you just have to live with it.

They're called

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

tentacled snakes (oh, yay! They have tentacles, too. What, "psychic powers" wasn't a large enough check mark on the Big List of Things Snakes Absolutely Should Not Have?). And while it's true that what the tentacled snakes do is more akin to "master tactician" than it is to pure-style psychic prowess, the results are basically the same: The snake reads its victims' intentions and uses this power to eat them.

Vanderbilt University



Well, duh. It's a snake, after all; it's not going to use its freaky super powers to give you the Keno numbers.

The tentacled snake subsists mostly on fish, which is a tougher life than it sounds because most of their prey has a built-in reaction to danger called a C-start. Basically, fish can sense sound waves in the water, and if they match certain criteria, a controlled muscle spasm kicks in automatically, sending them swimming at top speed away from the potential predator. The tentacled snake has actually evolved to exploit this, however. It will wait until a fish closes within striking distance, but it won't strike. First, it motions with its midsection in a precise way that mimics the prime "danger criteria," causing the fish to C-start (remember, this is an involuntary reaction on the fish's part). When the fish does start, it flips around in the blink of an eye and flees ... right into the snake's waiting jaws.

To recap: The tentacled snake has figured out the evolutionary mechanism by which fish perceive danger, and then constructed an elaborate, biological false alarm to send them scurrying into its own mouth. But if the C-start happens faster than the eye can see, how does the snake actually catch the damn things once they're headed in the right direction? Simple: It doesn't strike at the prey directly, it strikes at where