Mice will run right up to my snake. Do they breed at such a young age that the snakes and such can’t eat them fast enough to kill the stupid out of the species? How else could such dangerous behavior survive for this long in the species?
Funny you should ask that. I was watching this video, which is an 11-year-old’s POV (and narration) of feeding a mouse to a snake. I expected the mouse to bolt, but it didn’t. And the python was much quicker than I thought it would be.
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Perhaps mice cannot “see” a snake? Something in their vision does not allow seeing a snake as an animal? Snakes survived and thrived because they adapted by fooling their prey?
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No mouse has ever survived a snake attack?
This was going to be my guess. They don’t get a lot of learning opportunities to build experience.
Lab/feeder mice are exceptionally stupid, having had their fight-or-flight instincts pretty much bred out of them for millions of generations?
But that doesn’t apply too much, since learning can’t be passed on through genetics. I admit that the mice that learned could teach by example, and this could cascade through the generations, but my idea was that in the populations of billions of mice we’ve had, there must be a population that for some reason are scared of snakes. At first glance, these should be surviving better than the ones who just run right up to the snake. This isn’t happening, though.
Maybe snake attack is so rare in mouse-world that there’s no real evolutionary pressure to rid them of the stupid. Maybe such a small percentage die this way that there’s no essential difference in the breeding rates of the two types.
That is so cute.
Takes a while for the mouse to die though.
EDIT: Maybe they just never encounter snakes normally, and so don’t know what they are? Or maybe the snake was so slow it looked like a branch?
Note that a mouse being fed to a snake on your kitchen floor is being placed in a situation it might not to get into in the wild. Mice tend to stay near holes and cover, and avoid crossing open spaces. It makes sense, since they are often preyed upon by birds. They are probably wired to look for someplace to hide, rather than running away. The mouse dumped out in front of the snake is probably frantically looking for a hole to dart into.
According to several sources, it’s also true that they don’t see very well, either. They can’t make out details more than a foot or two in front of them. They largely get around with a very acute sense of smell.
Are you talking about feeder mice you bought from a pet store? If so they may have been bred in captivity so long they have lost any innate response to snakes. Feeder mice of course have not been subjected to selection to avoid snakes. Once you buy them, they are dead meat whether they are afraid of snakes or not. Anybody breeding mice to sell as snake food is not going to select their breeding stock from mice that know how to evade snakes, but rather the dopiest ones.
Ding ! Winner.
I had very similar behaviour with feeder mice from the petstore. Clueless. I don’t believe it is so much a loss of innate response to snakes as it is any response from any potential predator.
A friend once caught a wild mouse and knew about my snake, so he gave it to me to feed. This mouse was the smartest/fastest mouse I’d ever seen. Knew how to avoid the snake, and after several good strikes, managed to evade the snake’s bite. After seeing it not only survive, but how freaked out he was getting (being in an enclosed cage with an obvious predator), we decided to spare the mouse and keep him as a pet.
My take is that the feeder mice, having been bred in captivity, and living the “easy” life (surrounded by friends and family, no predators, and 3 squares a day) are numb to any real dangers in the world. Sure anything “big” is probably naturally taken as a threat. But many snakes aren’t that large (you don’t see them stretched out), and are therefore not that intimidating to look at.
Wild mice can be very dangerous to snakes; an infected bite or scratch can kill them. It’s safer for pet snakes (and their owners) to deal with meals that don’t struggle too much.
My experience is that any animal is much quicker than I thought it would be, given the motivation. I’ve seen a badger, of all things, move literally faster than the eye could follow, upon sneaking up to it’s lair where it was mulling about, some ten feet from the entrance hole.