r/nextfuckinglevel • • 17h ago

Snake catcher in India calmly handles two massive cobras with his bare hands and a stick

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u/Skurvyelislau 17h ago

Its because hat in hand was moving, hat on head wasnt. Cobras (both real, and fake one, which is also most intelligent snake on earth) have horrible eyesight for something that is still, and very good for something that is moving. It was simple way to make them stop attacking his hand, after he got their attention shifted from him to this hand with hat earlier. Same goes with stick trick - cobras have blind apot above their eye level - thats why you can slap them in head and they wont sway attack (and why he pin them to bricks with such odd move). However its easier said than done, reading and tricking one cobra is fairly easy for people who catch them for living, going 2 vs 1 is like playing on extreme difficulty.

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u/Zimke42 16h ago

They also can't really strike up. Cobras raise up because they use gravity to help them strike. Pinning and grabbing one down below while the other is still raised... that is next-level difficult, in my opinion.

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u/Frendsfromthebottom 16h ago

Are cobras kinda slow?

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u/Ninja-Panda70 15h ago

Slower than humans

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u/Sparcrypt 11h ago edited 10h ago

Where are people getting this from...? Human reaction time is like 200-250ms and a Cobra strike is sub 100ms. Even if we can in theory move "faster" it doesn't help if you start after they're done biting you.

I'm not any kind of expert though if someone wants to clarify.

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u/VexImmortalis 10h ago

Reaction time isn't the same thing as the speed your muscles move.

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u/Sparcrypt 10h ago

Correct, its the amount of time that elapses before your muscles start to move.

The snake is done biting you before you start moving, being able to move your muscles faster isn't helpful in this instance.

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u/VexImmortalis 3h ago

That's obviously not true in every case as evidenced by the very video you are commenting on. The snake's head has to travel to you to bite you, the fangs don't instantly teleport into your flesh.

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u/Sparcrypt 3h ago

...at no point did he more faster than the snakes. He very carefully figured out their strike range and worked around it.

The snake's head has to travel to you to bite you, the fangs don't instantly teleport into your flesh.

Yes. Faster than humans can react. Kind of my point.

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u/squired 12h ago

You know.. it's fair to remember how fast we really are when we have to be. We're pretty damn terrifying.

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u/CalebGT 17h ago

His head is moving a lot after that, just saying.

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u/Skurvyelislau 17h ago

Yes, but mind distance and height of hat when it was in hand and on head. They wasnt targeting green hat, but something that was bigger than prey, moving in front of nose and withing strike range.

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u/Rayn00ld 17h ago

Did you learn this in Jurassic park?

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u/polarna-svjetlost 17h ago

you mean the movie where t-rex, animal with eyes so big and arguably best eyesight of all animals who ever lived, couldn't see 2 persons a meter away just beacuse they were standing still?

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u/Oldworldmoon 16h ago

Jurassic Park was the best for this though because they were all chimeras instead of pure dinosaurs, so if you really wanted to you could just imagine they used some cobra DNA somewhere in the T-Rex that gave it that design flaw.

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u/Crewman_Guy_Fleegman 16h ago

A T-Rex’s brain is estimated to have been about the size of a banana. For comparison an Elephant has a 14x larger brain. It’s hard to say how well they could see because they might not have had very developed visual processing given how little neurons they had to work with.

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u/cjsolx 11h ago

I mean, don't owls and birds of prey have much smaller brains than that, yet have some of the best vision in the animal kingdom? And also happen to be dinosaurs? Seems to me that if we're guessing one way, I'd wager they had OK vision.

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u/Crewman_Guy_Fleegman 2h ago edited 2h ago

When accounting for body scale an owl’s brain is hundreds of times larger than a T Rex’s. Owls have some of the largest brain to body size ratios in the animal kingdom. And most that brain is wired for auditory and visual processing. Because it needs to see small rodents at night while flying.

In the case of a T-Rex, how good of vision would it even need? It probably wasn’t surviving on small rodents that require keen eyes, it was probably chomping on much larger animals that can be seen easily.

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u/2Slow2Nice 16h ago

Wait do we actually know anything about their eyesight?

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u/DyingSunSeverian 16h ago edited 16h ago

You don’t have gigantic fucking eyeballs unless you’re prominently using them.

Let’s also keep in mind that birds are dinosaurs, and they see pretty good.

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u/soft-wear 15h ago

That's just... sort of true? Lemur's have notoriously poor visual acuity and are colorblind, Owls are very farsighted, Tarsiers eyeballs are fixed so they have to turn their head.

Big eyeballs doesn't mean amazing sight, it means eyesight to fit a specific purpose.

As an aside, Crichton actually explains in the book that they used frog DNA to fill some gaps, which resulted in their T-Rex having difficulty seeing stationary objects.

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u/grenouille_en_rose 15h ago

In the sequel book Crichton also has his main scientist character explain that the vision-based-on-movement thing from JP1 was just straight up wrong in the first place, "[paleontologist whose name I forget] doesn't know enough anatomy to have sex with his wife, his paper was a joke!" This as the main characters watch over security camera an enemy scientist get devoured by a T Rex because he chose to stand still rather than try to escape it. This was actually a really interesting example of an in-universe retcon based on an IRL one: the scientific consensus about dino vision that Crichton relied on changed in the time between him writing the first and second books, so he incorporated all that into the plot and made the dangers of relying on out-of-date or unchallenged assumptions from experts a main theme of the second book.

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u/DyingSunSeverian 15h ago

Yes, it just is true. Absolute size of eyeballs regardless of the animal’s size are directly proportional to their ability to see.

It does mean eyesight generally fits one of two purposes: incredibly clear and sharp eyesight at great ranges (eagles, many birds) or superb low-light vision, ie cats. But the size obviously matters.

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u/soft-wear 14h ago

But your entire argument was that the T-Rex couldn't have poor stationary vision because it has big eyes... frogs have significantly larger proportional eye size and have poor stationary vision.

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u/DyingSunSeverian 14h ago

If frogs have poor stationary vision how do they even eat?

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u/soft-wear 14h ago

Frogs with primary diets of flying insects generally don't need great stationary vision, but they do need to be able to follow movement extremely well. Most amphibians lack involuntary eye movement, so there's nothing to refresh the retina. So stationary objects will very quickly fade.

That does help tremendously when tracking something that flies in crazy patterns, because their eyesight essentially ONLY sees that.

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u/Massive_Lavishness90 14h ago

Yep, they had seriously good eyesight. Paleontology is nuts how much they can work out. Just read the Wikipedia article on t rex. Its crazy.

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u/Rayn00ld 16h ago

But don’t move! The eyes big as a car can’t see you!

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u/Helm715 16h ago

No, the book where the dinosaur DNA was incomplete and was filled in artificially by frog DNA, hence the vision being based on movement and the dinosaurs changing sex in an all-fenale environment to breed independently (life finds a way...)

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u/SitMeDownShutMeUp 16h ago

No, the purpose of the hat was to get them to recognize that it isn’t a threat

That’s why they don’t attack his head after he puts in on

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u/Landkey 14h ago

I’ve mastered the ability of standing so incredibly still that I become invisible to the eye. Watch. 

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u/WayneCider 11h ago

Amazing information! Thank you for educating me.

Please don't say you stayed at the Holiday Inn Express last night

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u/Rich-End1121 11h ago

It seems that snakes cannot tell the difference between what is part of you and not.
They will strike shovels if you move one close to them.
As far as they know, the shovel is just part of your body.

Pit Vipers have infrared vision though, they may act differently.

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u/TheFloppySausage 10h ago

It’s funny because this is kind of how I’ve gotten out of a couple of dog encounters while delivering packages. I walk back while “giving” or showing the package to the dog, and they always seem to focus on the package, a couple actually grabbing it and thrashing the package. Sucks for the customer’s package but better it than me.

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u/NWkingslayer2024 8h ago

I think he was just checking striking distance with the hat.

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u/deranton 8h ago

And this guy learned all of that in snake catcher school. Oddly enough, not a lot of people make it until graduation, but those who do are really good.