A Lucky Escape for Nick
Nick is a 5-year old cat who weighs 3 kg and lives at Maleny in the mountains north of Brisbane.His owner while stroking him found a number of white pointed things in the fur around Nick's neck and brought them to the Museum's Inquiry Centre for identification.
They proved to be very sharp and strongly curved teeth, characteristic of snakes. As snakes do not chew, but swallow their food whole, their recurved teeth prevent the prey from slipping out once it is gripped. By comparing the teeth with those of specimens from our scientific collection we identified the snake as a carpet python, Morelia spilota variegata. From the size of the teeth we estimated that the length of the snake would have been about 2 metres.
Pythons feed by gripping the prey with their teeth and quickly throwing coils of their body around the prey and squeezing tighter and tighter until it is crushed and killed. A snake can disarticulate its jaws and swallow prey many times larger than the diameter of the snake's body. A 2 metre Carpet Python could take an adult cat. Armed with sharp claws and teeth, a cat is a dangerous animal to a snake. It would be interesting to know whether the curiosity of Nick or the hunger of the Carpet Python initiated the encounter. However, Nick has used one of his nine lives and is lucky to have escaped.