HELIUM IS THE GREAT EQUALIZER.Īgain and again, Young’s research returned to the growl of the king cobra. And who knows? For a non-human predator, they might be. Like growling or hissing, the fart noises are intended to be scary. “It’s basically snake flatulence,” Young says. Young found that, when cornered, snakes of multiple species produce popping sounds by forcefully pushing air out of vents in their back ends. (That’s what they’re for, after all: to scare off predators.)īut then there’s the farting. Snakes are pretty intimidating as it is, and most of their noises serve to make them seem scarier. melanoleucus's hisses and bellows have a shriek-like quality. Young discovered that, uniquely among snakes, the pine snake ( Pituophis melanoleucus) has a vocal cord. Some snakes make weirder noises than others. Most snakes make some kind of noise, whether it’s hissing, rattling, or rubbing their scales together to make a dry, raspy sound. Young started by trying to understand the basics: how snakes hiss, why they do it, and why all hisses sound pretty much the same. He realized that nobody was researching why or even how snakes make noise. The snake swayed toward him, mouth open, making a sound, Young says, “like an angry German shepherd.”įaced with a ticked-off king cobra, most people would lose it, but Young fell in love. Standing on its tail, the fifteen-foot king cobra was taller than the college sophomore. He’d gotten a job as “glorified bait” in a venomous snake show in the early 1980s, keeping the snakes distracted while a presenter spoke to the audience. Young was still an undergraduate the first time he heard a king cobra growl. He spilled his ssssecrets to mental_floss in a recent interview. Still University of Health Sciences, has dedicated his career to understanding the incredible, bizarre, and sometimes-hilarious world of snake noises.
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