The Sea-Serpent and the Whale (Part 1 of 2):
By: Brown Lotus
Tags: Sea Serpents, Cryptids, Science, Sea Monsters, Mysteries

The scene which continued to unfold before a shocked Captain Drevar on board the Pauline only grew more macabre. The massive sea-serpent was grappling with its victim, coiling round the panicked sperm whale with increasing vigor. Per the captain’s log:

‘The head and tail parts [of the serpent], each about thirty feet long, were acting as lever, twisting itself and victim round with great velocity. They sank out of sight about every two minutes, coming to the surface still revolving; and the struggles of the whale and two other whales, that were near, frantic with excitement, made the sea in their vicinity like a boiling cauldron; and a loud and confused noise was distinctly heard. This strange occurrence lasted some fifteen minutes, and finished with the tail portion of the whale being elevated straight in the air, then waving backwards and forwards, and lashing the water furiously in the last death struggle, when the body disappeared from our view, going down head foremost to the bottom, where no doubt it was gorged at the serpent’s leisure; and that monster of monsters may have been many months in a state of coma, digesting the huge mouthful.’

Drevar, though, was not the only witness to the blood-fest. Through his glasses, he caught sight of two other whales from the doomed creature’s pod. These normally fearless creatures appeared to be terror-stricken in their helplessness at the fate of their pod member. The log-book further elaborates:

‘Then two of the largest sperm-whales that I have ever seen moved slowly thence towards [our] vessel, their bodies more than usually elevate out of the water, and not spouting or making the least noise, but seeming quite paralyzed with fear; indeed, a cold shiver went through my own frame on beholding the last agonizing struggle of the poor whale that had seemed as helpless in the coils of the vicious monster as a small BIRD in the talons of a hawk.’

It’s almost too tragic to contemplate this Darwinian, adrenaline-filled ‘survival of the fittest’-type struggle in any close detail, but it does pose necessary questions. How, precisely, does a python attack, and what must it be like for its agonized quarry to endure?

If you’re herpetologically-naive, like I am, you might wonder just what the big deal is to find oneself ‘hugged’ in a hungry python’s coils. Small mammals and reptiles are quickly overwhelmed by constrictor snakes; that much is a given. So are small, vulnerable children and even larger mammals, such as pigs, deer, monkeys and cattle (the latter creatures of course having limbs, but no ‘arms’).

(Photo courtesy of Unsplash)

But if an adult human found herself in the grasp of a python, especially a small one, wouldn’t it be possible to at least ‘hop’ to the phone and call 911? If her arms were constricted, couldn’t she still hop to a neighbor’s or the street where someone could come to her aid? Couldn’t a very strong person — say, a young wrestler at his prime of both life and career — simply use his own strength to un-furl a hungry constrictor?

Luna Lenay, a Zoology major and constrictor-enthusiast from Quora, described feeding a mouse to her small constrictor snake. As she observed, the snake used its fangs to crush the mouse’s skull with such force that its brains exploded and the eye-balls popped from its sockets (let’s hope the little guy was already dead before this happened).

As to the supreme physical force that a constrictor’s muscles are capable of, Lenay recounts an incident in which she tried to handle her snake while he wasn’t in the best of moods. ‘Two-thirds’ of her cranky pet wrapped itself around her arm in protest; its power, according to Lenay, was so startling that she feared her wrist might actually fracture. The pain, she related, was incredible. Very quickly, Lenay lost feeling in her forearm and hand. By the time her pet was subdued, she was left with ‘blue fingers’ and bruises.

Lenay’s story was one of many, many incidents I’ve been able to research on-line. [Note: to those readers who have snakes, or have had interaction with them, please feel free to share your stories!]

The python, I have learned, has a force not meant to be regarded with laxity.

Sources: CBS 12 News, ABC Science, Daily Mail, Quota, Wikipedia, BBC News