Born Knowing: Tentacled Snakes Innately Predict Future Prey Behavior
Kenneth C. Catania · 2010
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Description
Kenneth Catania published this animal behavior study in PLOS ONE in 2010. The tentacled snake hunts fish underwater by trickery: it feints with its body, startling the fish into fleeing straight toward its jaws. When a fish sits at a right angle, though, its escape dart carries it sideways, so the snake must strike where the fish will be, not where it is.
Catania tested laboratory-born snakes that had never hunted, filming strikes at hundreds of frames per second through a glass barrier that prevented any learning from success or failure. The naive snakes aimed at the fish's future position just as experienced adults do. Catania concludes the prediction is built in at birth, not learned. The study is a clean demonstration that a complex hunting forecast can be hardwired into a newborn brain.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Kenneth C. Catania |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2010 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 41 KB |
| LICENSE | Creative Commons Attribution License |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | PLOS ONE |
Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010953