Snakes don’t just bite for fun. It’s usually a matter of life or death before a snake will bare its fangs. But the obvious drawbacks of working with venomous snakes have meant that no one had directly measured the way they dispense their venom during a strike. However, this did not deter Bruce Young from adapting a technique used for monitoring blood flow to measure how a striking rattlesnake expels its venom.
Rattlesnakes use their fangs for two reasons: hunting and defence. Young wanted to know how the snake ejected venom in both types of strike. Working with Krista Zahn, an undergraduate at Lafayette College, Young operated on four adult diamondback rattlesnakes and implanted a perivascular flow probe around the snake’s right venom duct.
Young tested the snakes bite in three ways. First he provoked defensive strikes using mice and rats. Then he induced predatory strikes using mice alone, so...
