{"id":27035,"date":"2025-07-27T04:18:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T04:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/27035\/"},"modified":"2025-07-27T04:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T04:18:10","slug":"this-reptile-has-a-special-skill-of-striking-when-its-prey-becomes-as-soft-as-a-boiled-egg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/27035\/","title":{"rendered":"This reptile has a special skill of striking when its prey becomes \u201cas soft as a boiled egg\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A queen snake is very particular with its habitat. It&#8217;s found in areas with clean running streams and watersheds with rocky bottoms. And that&#8217;s because it has a very specific diet: crayfish. Newly-molted crayfish, to be precise.<\/p>\n<p>Signal crayfish are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discoverwildlife.com\/animal-facts\/worlds-most-invasive-species\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">invasive across Europe<\/a>, but are native to North America. A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discoverwildlife.com\/animal-facts\/worlds-most-invasive-species\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">crayfish&#8217;s<\/a> shell is usually too hard for predators to crack into, so the queen <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discoverwildlife.com\/animal-facts\/reptiles\/snake-facts\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">snake<\/a> instead waits for the creature to shed its shell and expose its body, when it becomes &#8220;as soft as a boiled egg&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Freshly-molted crayfish look very similar, but the queen snake has a special trick to identify them: its sense of smell.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>More amazing wildlife stories from around the world<\/p>\n<p>Top image: a queen snake in North Carolina, United States. Credit: Patrick Coin (Patrick Coin), <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/2.5\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">CC BY-SA 2.5<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A queen snake is very particular with its habitat. It&#8217;s found in areas with clean running streams and&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-27035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}