Inspired by this video (not for the squeamish!).
How long would this chick have survived in the belly of the snake? Which would have killed it first? Lack of oxygen or the snake’s digestive fluids?
That sort of chick. :smack:
I was thinking, how big is this snake going to be?
Gross video 
I’m not a biologist, but certainly lack of oxygen would kill the bird before stomach acids played a role.
It takes several days or even weeks for a snake to digest its prey. Birds will die in a minute or two without oxygen. Regardless of any air inside the snake, the snake’s muscles should crush the bird and prevent its lungs from working.
snakes have strong stomach action to break down bone. i think a couple days.
that’s a couple days to break down bone, not for the prey to live.
A bird is going to suffocate within minutes after a snake swallows it. Toads, frogs, and lizards have lower metabolic rates and could probably survive inside a snake for enough time that the stomach acid would kill them before the lack of oxygen did.
There are a couple of entertaining chapters in the recently published bestseller by Mary Roach called Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal that address this question and related ones. It’s beyond my ken to say how authoritative an overview it is, but it’s a good read at the very least. The bottom-line conclusion is that things that are ingested die pretty fast.
I would think that the first seriously non-optimal thing to happen, would be the prey gets crushed to death as it gets squozen down the snake’s throat. Or maybe the snake bites it and it dies (especially if it’s a venomous snake). N’est-ce pas?
ETA: Didn’t this get tangentially discussed a few weeks ago, when that python killed the kid in that pet store in Canada?
I thought the same thing. After seeing some of the stuff I found when looking for pics of tentacles for an assignment, with filters turned off, I was afraid that someone with a budget had started to animate some of this…
Snakes often kill their prey by envenoming it or constricting before swallowing it to avoid injury to themselves. However, they don’t “crush it to death,” either by constriction or by swallowing, in the sense of breaking bones or rupturing organs. The prey dies by suffocation by having its chest compressed. In the case of cold-blooded prey, with a great capacity for anaerobic respiration, death can take a long time even if the animal isn’t able to breathe.
According to Cecil, a whaler named James Bartley is said to have been swallowed whole by a sperm whale off the Falklands in 1891 and was cut from the belly of the beast some 15 hours later. He is said to have recovered fully from his ordeal, although this whale’s tale is treated as more of a legend than a factual event.