We've all experienced a meal that we've wished we hadn't eaten, but a snake in Macedonia paid the ultimate price when a centipede it had eaten made a bid for freedom by trying to eat its way out of the snake's stomach, researchers reported.
It ended badly for both, the researchers say, with the dead centipede sticking halfway out of the stomach of the equally dead nose-horned viper.
The centipede had plainly eviscerated the unfortunate reptile from the inside as it attempted to break out, they say.
"All of us were astonished, as nobody has ever seen something like this," Ljiljana Tomovic, a University of Belgrade herpetologist, told Live Science.
Tomovic and research colleagues made the discovery as they went about tagging reptiles for study on an island in Macedonia's Lake Prespa called Golem Grad.
The island is home to thousands of snakes and tortoises.
One of the researchers overturned a stone to discover the grisly remains of what ended up as fight to the death.
The viper was a small 8-inch-long female only slightly longer than its intended victim, the centipede it tried to consume.
While nose-horned vipers occasionally add centipedes to their normal diet of small mammals, birds and lizards, the small female "gravely underestimated" both the strength and size of its intended meal, the researchers wrote in the journal Ecologica Montenegrina.
A dissection of the snake revealed all of its internal organs were missing, they wrote, and "the entire volume of its body was occupied by the centipede."
Before dying the centipede had likely destroyed the snake's organ in its attempt to chew or claw its way out, they concluded.
Centipedes are tough to kill and are ferocious predators in their own right, the researchers say, and in this case, the centipede even outweighed the snake.
"Therefore, we cannot dismiss the possibility that the snake had swallowed the centipede alive, and that, paradoxically, the prey has eaten its way through the snake, almost reaching its freedom," they wrote.
Nose-horned vipers, also known as sand vipers, are a venomous species common in southern Europe and the Balkans.
Its highly toxic venom makes it one of the most dangerous snakes in Europe -- although that was of little help to the unfortunate example choosing a centipede for what became its final meal.
