"They squeeze their prey, and each time the prey breathes out, they squeeze more, giving the prey less volume to breath back in. "All constrictor snakes use the same general strategy for constricting," Mohammadi said. Its powerful constriction appears to have trapped and killed the cobra, even as the python died from the cobra's venom. The cobra's eagerness may have led to its downfall - perhaps it bit the python and then strayed a little too close while waiting for it to succumb, he suggested.Īnd the python didn't give up without a fight. Once attacked, the python may have tried to slither away, but a slow-moving python would have had a tough time evading the much-speedier cobra, Burbrink said.Ĭobras incapacitate their prey with venomous bites, injecting a neurotoxin cocktail that paralyzes respiratory muscles - and they don't necessarily wait until their prey is dead before swallowing it, Burbrink told Live Science. "The python was most likely attempting to defend itself," she said. "King cobras feed almost exclusively on other snakes," Mohammadi said, whereas reticulated pythons typically eat mammals or birds. Those white marks are remnants of the ring pattern found in juveniles, which is much brighter when they're young, Burbrink explained.Īnd the python appears to be a close match in size to its king cobra opponent, he added.īut what happened here? It's difficult to say for sure from a single photo, though the tangle probably started when the cobra attacked the python as prey, Shab Mohammadi, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told Live Science in an email. "You can see little white lines on the cobra in the picture, on the part that's trailing out on the path," he said. Though there's little in the image to help determine their scale, juvenile cobras have distinctive markings that are absent in this one, indicating that it's an adult. "And they're both big ones," Burbrink pointed out.
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