Well, you guys asked for it, so here it is. This is probably from the most important paper that has come out of here-and it is something special. In an attempt to keep it more interesting, I will omit lots of the details and just get to the results. This is not something that I wrote, but something that my advisor wrote long before I got here.
The animals had food withheld for 30 days prior to the start of the project. After being fed a meal 25% of their body mass, within 24 hours after feeding, the animals experienced a 17-fold increase in oxygen consumption rates and held this for approx 4.5 days-this is comparable to you sitting on the couch and then jumping up and running full speed for 4 days-literally.
Within 1-3 days postfeeding, the small intestine experiences an increase of 6-26 times the fasting levels of nutrient uptake rates, and the uptake capacities reached 11-24 times the fasting rate.
All of these values were back to the fasting rates by days 8-14.
After feeding, by day 3, the small intestine has DOUBLED IN SIZE. By day 14, it was back to its fasting size. Virtually all of the other organs gained some mass after feeding; the only one which did not was the gall bladder-this is because it empties its stored bile upon feeding.
That is a brief summary of the results of this paper. In the wild, P. molurus employs a "sit-and-wait" strategy for feeding. This differs greatly from a black racer or something of the sort which might be out cruising around all day long looking for a bite to eat. However, our pythons will just sit in a promising location and wait for the food to come to it-even if it takes months. Basically, what this paper tells us, is that the snake undergoes a good amount of physiological regulation to allow it to go for very long periods of time without any addition of energy. This contrasts steeply with "active foragers" (black racer) which experience a very high resting metabolic rate that uses a lot of energy, but it is replaced much more frequently than it is with the pythons. We have an entire paper contrasting 4 frequent feeders with 4 infrequent feeders-I'll post the results of this a bit later. Below is the citation for this article-reviewed and read by scientists around the world. If you have any questions, fire away. I didn't really have the energy to proofread everything, but it should all be right...
~Brian Ott
Adaptive Responses to Feeding in Burmese Pythons: Pay Before Pumping. S. Secor and J. Diamond. The Journal of Experimental Biology 198. 1313-1325 (1995).
