A bunch of researchers, who've been getting up close and personal with some hefty python species in Thailand and Vietnam, are now singing the praises of snake meat. Yep, you heard that right. They're suggesting that snake meat is the next big thing and are even hatching plans to start farming these slithery critters for mass consumption.
From Yahoo Life:
Their research, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that python farming could offer a solution to rising food insecurity around the globe, exacerbated by climate change.
The researchers, who studied more than 4,600 pythons, found that both Burmese and reticulated pythons grew rapidly in their first year of life, and they required less food (in terms of what’s known as feed conversion: the amount of feed to produce a pound of meat) than other farmed products, including chicken, beef, pork, salmon - and even crickets.
The snakes were fed a mix of locally sourced food, including wild-caught rodents, pork byproducts and fish pellets. They gained up to 1.6 ounces a day, with the females growing faster than their male counterparts.
The snakes were never force-fed, and the researchers found that the reptiles could fast for long periods without losing much body mass, which meant they required less labor for feeding than traditional farmed animals.
“They need very little water. A python can live off the dew that forms on its scales. In the morning, it just drinks off its scales and that’s enough,” said Daniel Natusch, a herpetologist and biodiversity expert who was involved in the research. “Theoretically you could just stop feeding it for a year.”
In a world where scientists predict climate change will lead to more extreme weather and environmental shocks, a species that is heat-tolerant, resilient to food shortages and able to produce protein “far more efficiently than anything else studied to date” is “almost a dream come true,” Natusch said.
