It doesn't seem like the most appetizing of delicacies on paper, but who knows if in the near or distant future, restaurant menus will include dishes prepared with snake meat, something that, by the way, is already common in some places. of the world. Scientists from Australia, a country where one can find these reptiles even in the false bottom of the trunk of the car, assure that eating snakes can help reduce the impact of diet in the face of climate change.
Dan Natusch, a herpetologist at Macquarie University in Australia, has documented in the journal Scientific Reports the supposed benefits of eating snakes. He began to consider the idea when he was working, along with other researchers, on a project on commercial python farms in Vietnam and Thailand to find out if specimens raised in the wild could be distinguished from those raised in captivity. When they studied these animals they discovered that farm pythons grew at a high rate.
“As snake biologists, we already knew that pythons had impressive physiology. After talking to python breeders and continuing to monitor their growth rates, their remarkable physiologies became even more evident,” Natusch explains in the magazine. Like all snakes, pythons are ectothermic or cold-blooded animals, and their body temperature depends on the environment. In order for their body to maintain its vital functions, they have to sunbathe, so they do not need to produce that heat themselves, which is an important source of energy savings that allows them to convert food into body mass.
In the experiment, Natusch and his colleagues analyzed reticulated pythons (Malayopython reticulatus) and Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) on farms, analyzing what they ate and how quickly they grew. And so they saw the great resistance of the pythons during prolonged fasts, which allowed them to go months without eating without losing too much weight. This quality, they point out in the study, could be very valuable in the event of a crisis in the food system, as in the first days of covid-19.
“As we anticipate even greater global economic and climate volatility in the future, pythons could be a solution to those future challenges,” says Natusch. “Python breeding could be a big part of the solution for a part of the world that already suffers from a severe lack of protein,” such as Africa, says this researcher.
However, the possibility that the use of python meat as a protein source will spread beyond where it is now common (one billion people in Southeast and East Asia and parts of Latin America or Africa already eat snakes) remains. still very far away. First, because there is still a lot of information needed about the environmental impact of their farming and their nutritional content, both in proteins and micronutrients. But above all, due to the cultural reluctance of the Western population towards this dish. At the moment, Natusch, who has tried snake meat, assures that it is “quite tasty.”
The research of these Australian scientists seems to continue the path of other food controversies. Thus, in recent years, different organizations have put on the table, never better said, the possibility of eating insects or jellyfish or reducing meat consumption, proposals that have met with outright rejection by a good part of the population. In essence, the need to change the food industry to fight climate change. Scientists argue that cattle raised for human consumption account for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, that waste from the pork industry pollutes rivers, and that growing food for farms causes deforestation.
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