text: Image: Ger Dekker / Flickr Creative Commons 
   
   As twilight descends, nocturnal bat species rouse from their daily resting places to feed, creating spectacular clouds as they pour out of caves en masse. But look closer at Jamaican fruit bat colonies as they emerge from sinkhole caves in Cuba, and you may catch a glimpse of a concurrent macabre ritual: As the bats erupt from the cave, a deadly curtain of Cuban boas hangs in their path, aiming to snatch the winged creatures mid-flight. 
   
   
   
   That’s right—these snakes coordinate their attacks, and the result is terrifying. 
   
   
   
   Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was guiding a bird- and mammal-watching tour through Desembarco del Granma National Park, Cuba, when he first noticed the cavern-hunting snakes. Intrigued by the bold behavior, he decided to take a closer look. 
   
   
   
   The boas involved could all be found basking near the cave’s entrance during the day, while the bats slumbered in an adjacent chamber separated by a narrow passage. As daylight faded, some of the snakes would move from their warm nooks into the passageway. 
   
   There, they would dangle their serpentine bodies from the ceiling, ready to strike as bats flew past. Other snakes would take up similar hunting positions as dawn approached, catching the bats as they returned. During each potential feeding opportunity, Dinets dutifully recorded the position of the snakes as well as their hunting success, or lack thereof. 
   
   
   
   “There is an old dogma stating that reptiles are mostly solitary and stupid. My finding is just one of many recent discoveries challenging it.” 
   
   After 8 days of records, Dinets concluded the snakes coordinated their hunts, and published his results in the Animal Behavior and Cognition. The first boa would pick its place. Then, when the next slithered up, it would position itself in near the first. And if a third snake joined in, it would hang with the others, too. Dinets considered that the snakes might all just prefer the same areas of the passage, but no snake chose the same segment twice during the entire study, suggesting coordination, not similar taste in locale. 
   
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   And that coordination paid off—boas were significantly more likely to capture a meal if they hunted together. “Visual observations suggested that most bats were able to avoid flying near boas when there were one or two boas present, but with three boas present the bats had to fly either within striking distance from one of them (often colliding with the boas) or very low above the passage floor,” Dinets explained in the paper. 
   
   
   
   While the snakes coordinated with one another, it’s not quite accurate to say they hunted in a “pack” like wolves, as that implies a social aspect that Dinets didn’t see. “I saw no evidence of direct communication,” he told Gizmodo. “They just take each other’s positions into account.” 
   
   Still, coordination to maximize hunting success is practically unknown in reptiles (crocodilians and monitor lizards are notable exceptions). “There is an old dogma stating that reptiles are mostly solitary and stupid,” said Dinets. “My finding is just one of many recent discoveries challenging it.” 
   
   Intriguingly, this isn’t the first cave where serpents have been observed hunting bats mid-flight. Writer, ecologist, and wildlife photographer Neil Losin and his colleagues have observed a similar strategy among snakes in Puerto Rico. “We saw up to 8 boas hunting at the same time, and it’s certainly quite a ‘gauntlet’ for the bats to run,” he said. But he and his team only observed and filmed—they didn’t perform quantitative science to determine if the boas were coordinating their hunting. 
   
   
   
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   There’s also the famous Cavern of Serpents near the village of Kantenmo, Mexico, where tourists flock to see snakes snatch bats as they exit for the evening. Again, no one has looked closely for coordination. But given the number of examples of this style of cavern feeding, “it is possible that coordinated hunting is not uncommon among snakes,” Dinets said. “But it will take a lot of very patient field research to find out.” 
   
   Update 5/26: Herpetologists have been reacting to this study on social media, and not everybody’s convinced by the author’s conclusions. David Steen, wildlife ecologist at Auburn University Museum of Natural History, took to Facebook to dispute the idea that the boas are coordinating their attacks, arguing that such behavior is difficult to prove without a controlled experiment. Red Steen’s reaction and Dinets’ responses here. 
   
   Christie Wilcox is a science writer, author of Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry, and all around biology nerd. Follow her on Twitter. ||||| 150 SHARES Share Tweet 
   
   Snakes, although as social as birds and mammals, have long been thought to be solitary hunters and eaters. A new study from UT shows that some snakes coordinate their hunts to increase their chances of success. 
   
   Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor of psychology, observed the Cuban boa—the island nation’s largest native terrestrial predator—in bat caves for the study. 
   
   Many Cuban caves shelter large bat colonies, and in some of them small populations of boas regularly hunt the bats as they fly out at dusk and return at dawn. Dinets noticed that the boas hung down from the ceiling of the cave entrance and grabbed passing bats in midair. He found that if more than one boa was present, the snakes coordinated their positions in such a way that they formed a wall across the entrance. This made it difficult or impossible for the bats to pass without getting within striking distance of at least one boa. 
   
   Such group hunts were always successful, and the more snakes were present, the less time it took each to capture a bat. But if there was only one boa, it sometimes failed to secure a meal. 
   
   These findings were recently published open-access in the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition. 
   
   To date, only a handful of snakes have been observed to hunt in groups, and coordination among them—or among any other group-hunting reptiles—has never been proven, Dinets said. 
   
   Only a few of the world’s 3,650 snake species have ever been observed hunting in the wild, so very little is known about snakes’ diverse hunting tactics. 
   
   “It is possible that coordinated hunting is not uncommon among snakes, but it will take a lot of very patient field research to find out,” Dinets said. 
   
   He added that observing the Cuban boa, although an amazing spectacle, is becoming increasingly difficult since only the most remote caves still have boas. The boas are being hunted for food and possibly pet trade. 
   
   “I suspect that if their numbers in a cave fall, they can’t hunt in groups anymore and might die out even if some of them don’t get caught by hunters,” Dinets said. “A few of these caves are in national parks, but there’s a lot of poaching everywhere.” 
   
   — 
   
   CONTACT: 
   
   Lola Alapo (865-974-3993, lalapo@utk.edu) 
   
   Vladimir Dinets (vdinets@utk.edu)
target: – Time to nix that belief you've been clinging to that snakes are "mostly solitary and stupid," Vladimir Dinets tells Gizmodo. The University of Tennessee researcher has found one particular Caribbean species that apparently hunts together. Dinets' study in the Animal Behavior and Cognition journal details his research on Chilabothrus angulifer, or the Cuban boa, which Tennessee Today notes is the country's largest resident predator on land and which apparently hunts fruit bats in sinkhole caves in a coordinated way. Dinets observed the snakes for eight days in the caves of Desembarco del Granma National Park, where he had noticed they would hang from the ceiling near the entrance at dawn and dusk, ready to pounce when the bats flew in and out of the caves. But it wasn't just random positioning. The snakes hunkered down in close proximity to each other, in seemingly strategic locations, so when the bats tried to pass, they were trapped by a "hissing, snapping curtain" of boas, as ScienceAlert puts it. What signified coordination and not just a shared preference for one location: No snake positioned itself in the same "segment" twice. Dinets also notes that one to three snakes were present for each hunt; only two boas failed to catch a bat, and both were hunting solo. When successful, it took one boa an average of 19 minutes to catch a bat, but three only 6.7 minutes. What's unclear is how rare this is: There are 3,650 snake species, but the natural hunting habits of just a handful have been studied. "It will take a lot of very patient field research to find out" if others hunt like this, too. (Here's how boa constrictors actually kill their victims.)