In the Disney movie Robin Hood, which is entirely populated by anthropomorphic animals, Prince John, a lion, has a supercilious, sniveling serpent of an advisor, Sir Hiss, who also happens to be the only adult in the room among the bad guys.
Sometimes, Sir Hiss gets on Prince John’s nerves, and on at least two occasions that I remember, this is the result:
It’s funny because it’s slapstick, and if any fictional snake deserves it, it’s definitely him.
But, of course, snakes are real animals with real feelings, not cartoon characters.
Is it possible to knot or tangle a snake in this fashion, and if someone did, what would happen to the snake?
The article addresses when snakes self-knot themselves. Maybe I am misinterpreting the question, but I read the OP as the derivative: could a snake unknot themselves if someone else did the knotting.
I had a 6-foot boa constrictor named “Cuddles” that could double the diameter of its body to ingest a large rat and halve its body diameter to slither through a small opening in the terrarium in order to escape. I brought it with me to college. Fun times.
So I believe at least some species of snakes could unknot themselves if they had to since locomoting with a knot in its body wouldn’t be very effective, but I think tying a snake into a knot wouldn’t be a very easy thing to do.
At some point during the cinching process, it would become a crunching process as various bones and ligaments get crushed and stretched beyond design parameters.
What about two snakes into, say, a Western Union splice?
Given all the snakes present in my youth were highly venomous, the only safe way to tie a 6’ Eastern Brown snake into a reef knot, which I’ve done, is after they are dead, preferably decapitated. And they don’t untangle themselves from that … which is hardly surprising.
I had a mate who claimed he tied one into a bowline, which would be prosaic but I think that was a furphy.
The way snakes ordinarily move is, you take the curvature of this section of your body, and then the next section of your body takes on that curvature, and so on down the entire length of the animal. Doing this with a knot would result in the knot moving down the length, until it reached the tail and came undone.
I had a friend who kept a yellow Boa Constrictor as a pet. This snake was about 5 ft long and appeared to enjoy being handled. My friend would routinely tie it in a loose overhand knot, which the snake dealt with just as Chronos describes.
I have no idea what would have been the result of trying to tighten the knot. I imagine the snake would have resented this, and it certainly seemed strong enough to resist effectively.
This was the cover story in an issue of Scientific American back in the 1966, which shows the hagfish tying itself into a knot, something that it did to escape from predators
A series of illustrations in the article shows it looping itself into an overhand knot to slip out of the grip of a human hand. (It helps that hagfish produce enormous quantities of mucus-like slime)
