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She arched her head up toward the door, as if offering her human audience a chance to say farewell to the rat as its hind legs and tail slid into its esophagus.īut Haydee’s performance was far from over. Her jaws stretched apart to make room, and she worked the rat into her expanding throat. She used her side teeth to pull her head over the dead rodent. It heaved for a while with rapid breaths, then stopped. Between Haydee’s coils, the upended rat was still visible, its back legs and tail jerking in the air. She shot across the cage, snagged the rat with her upper teeth and wrapped her thick midriff around her victim. She slowly raised her metallic-colored head, indifferently flicking her tongue.
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The rat stood frozen in the corner, but Haydee ignored her new roommate for several minutes. Nelson opened the cage that held a dark gray Burmese python named Haydee, and heaved in a large rat. His findings offer tantalizing clues that might someday be applied to our own bodies as medical treatments. He has been finding adaptations throughout the snake’s entire body, such as the ability to rapidly expand organs and then shrink them back down. Secor has been exploring for a quarter of a century. They were now about to perform one of the most extraordinary acts of metabolism in the animal kingdom - a feat that Dr. “Any of these could kill you if you let it,” he said, somehow cheerfully. Nelson never let his guard down, even as he let another snake flick its tongue over his eyebrow. Nelson said, as if he was referring to his toy Pomeranian upstairs. Secor asked a tan Burmese python as it slithered up his shoulders. Nelson, a product manager at a local car parts factory, hoisted the snakes one at a time out of their cages. Secor’s lab, a few miles to the west at the University of Alabama.ĭr. Some of the Nelsons’ pythons and boa constrictors were recent adoptions from Dr. He pulled into the driveway of David and Amber Nelson, who welcomed him into their converted basement, filled with stacks of refrigerator-size, glass-doored cages. On a cold, gray winter day, Stephen Secor drove to the outskirts of town to catch up with some old friends.