A street snake charmer in India passed out during a live show as his python wrapped around his neck and strangled him. How did this happen?
Street Show Gone Wrong
Performing with large pythons comes with obvious hazards. Recently, a video surfaced of a snake charmer in India whose live show turned into an emergency situation. In the video, the snake charmer can be seen calling the attention of the public to come and watch his show. He began the show by picking up the large python and letting it rest on his shoulders. As the show went on, the python slowly made its way onto the snake charmer's neck until it had wrapped itself around it.
Initially, the man still looked rather calm and just went on with his show while trying to get the snake off his neck. However, just a short while later, he was sitting on the ground and appears to be struggling with the snake and his breathing. A few seconds more and he passed out in front of his audience.
Fortunately, some members of the crowd stepped in to help remove the snake from his neck and sprinkle water on the snake charmer until he regained consciousness. Three unidentified men brought the man to a hospital in Varanasi, but there are no current reports on his condition.
Pythonidae Family
Pythons are a member of the Pythonidae family, which contains some of the largest snakes in the world. To be clear, although they share some characteristics with the boas, they do not come from the same family. There are 41 known python species within the pythonidae family, and most of them can be found in Asia, Africa, and Australia. They are not native to the Americas, but recently, South Florida had a python population problem, so much so that snake hunters from India have had to come and help authorities.
Interestingly, pythons are considered primitive because they still have evidence of a pelvis and hind limbs, and unlike other snakes that have evolved to having just one lung, pythons still have two.
Pythons are understandably intimidating creatures because of their size and sheer strength, but unlike their other relatives, they are actually nonvenomous snakes. Although pythons have different diets and feeding behaviors depending on their size, what's common among them is their method of catching prey wherein they grab their target using their long backward-turned teeth and kill it using constriction.
There is still contention, however, regarding the purpose of the constriction. Many scientists believe that pythons constrict their prey to suffocate them, but new findings reveal that among boa constrictors, they constrict their prey not to suffocate them but to cut off the blood supply to the brain, leading to the prey's eventual death.
In the past, there have been quite a number of python and boa attacks on humans. In fact, just last year, the body of a missing Indonesian man was found inside a 20-foot reticulated python.
