Might snakes provide a way of testing Dawkins’s selfish gene hypothesis?
When researchers went to get a look at a cape cobra snake fight, it turned out to be one cobra swallowing another. They named the newly well-fed study animal NN011, otherwise “Hannibal.” Apparently, “Diner, meet Dinner!” is not an uncommon relationship among cape cobras so a study of the details ensued: Snake-eating, they found, was common among five of the six species studied, accounting for 13 to 43 percent of the cobras’ diets. Four per cent of the snake dinners eaten were of the same species as the diner. One researcher reasoned, In all the cannibalism events that the researchers witnessed themselves, both the eater and the eaten were males, leading them to suspect that this behavior may be a Read More ›