A SNAKE as thin as a strand of spaghetti has the most flexible jaw in the
vertebrate world, allowing it to gobble up its favourite food of ant larvae at a
rate of nearly one per second.
鈥淓verything you know about how snakes eat is different in the threadsnake,鈥�
says biologist Nathan Kley of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
As Kley and his colleague Elisabeth Brainerd report in Nature (vol
402, p 369), the threadsnake has three extra hinges in its lower jaw that allow
the sides to bend outward in a 鈥渃artoon smile鈥� while the tip of the chin caves
back toward the throat, raking the prey in. The entire cycle takes a fifth of a
second.
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Kley believes that the slender snakes may need to eat their food in a hurry
in order to get out of the nest before adult ants rally and attack them.
