Meeting Abstract
Many predators feed in microenvironments that may constrain their movements and obscure or block our observation and study. For example, constricting snakes probably often feed on mammals underground in tunnels, where space may be too limited for typical coiling and constriction. In such circumstances, some snakes will press prey against the wall of a tunnel with part of the snake’s body, in a predatory behavior that has been called “pinioning.” Pinioning serves the same purposes as constriction, to restrain and incapacitate prey before ingestion. However, pinioning behavior is not well known and pinioning performance in tunnels has not yet been quantified or compared to typical constriction on open surfaces. We measured the pinioning pressures of kingsnakes in simulated tunnels and compared them to typical constriction pressures on the surface. Pinioning and constriction pressures are good measures of predation performance because they reflect a key variable (pressure) that can directly incapacitate the prey. We found that pinioning pressures in tunnels were higher than constriction pressures on open surfaces. These results indicate that snakes can exert impressively high predation pressures underground as well as on the surface, and more generally that predation performance is not always reduced in microenvironments that impose constraints on predatory movements.
