Not everyone knows this, but many snakes are quite accomplished at fishing. For many species that live in aquatic environments, fish make up a large part of their diets. The snake in today's video was captured fishing on the Colorado River in Bastrop, Texas, a few years ago. The kayakers who stumbled across the scene can only watch in amazement at the snake's tenacity.
The catfish it has in its jaws looks like it too large for the fish to swallow, but the slippery serpent refuses to relax its grip on the fish.
At one moment, it even looks like the catfish may be gaining the upper hand when the fight spills out further into the water and the fish can start breathing again.
We may never know how this encounter eventually turned out. It cannot be good for the snake that the two eventually slipped beneath the surface of that murky water. The fish would have to tire out fast for the snake to have a chance. It seems likely the snake would have to relax its grip to come up for air though.
Although we know that snakes have elastic bodies that give them the ability to swallow larger prey items, this battle seemed like a losing proposition for the snake. That catfish was quite large and would have been a challenge for it to get down its gullet.
Amazingly, this is not the first time we have seen a video like this at Wide Open Spaces. Every few years someone captures a snake trying to eat a big fish and it seems to go viral. In one instance, we saw a snake eat a trout that a fisherman had released only moments earlier. The moral of the story here is to never underestimate the fishing abilities of a snake!
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
