Credit: Flickr User Squamata55
For years the scientific community has been fascinated by the phenomena of snakes, such as pythons, eating massive meals at one time and breaking them down slowly over time. Now thanks to a study by Leslie Leinwand there is an answer to how pythons manage this feat. After the python eats its organs swell up to two times their size to accommodate this massive amount of digestion. But what could cause an organ to swell this much? Leslie and her team have an answer to this as well, fatty acids. When they drew the snake’s blood after it ate they report that the blood was so filled with fat that it was opaque and it “looked like milk”. Leslie and her team have not stopped their research here, in fact they learned that when they take three of the fatty acids found in the blood of these pythons and inject them into a living mouse the mouse’s heart will grow just like the pythons did.
This finding lead to another mystery for Leinwand and her team because they are still yet to discover how having large amounts of fat in the blood is harmless to a python while in a human it is incredibly damaging. In an attempt to get answers Leinwand and her team have injected mice with heart disease with the three fatty acids that lead to heart growth to see if those lipids can have any effects on the condition. Stay tuned…
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