Most people think constrictors like boas and anacondas squeeze the air out of their prey with their muscular coils. And most people are wrong, according to a new, study that offers an entirely different theory, explains that colleague Dave Hardy first noticed two decades ago that the speed at which prey die in the clutches of a boa is far too quick to be from suffocation—a painful, drawn-out process,He supposed an animal's death was caused by circulatory or cardiac arrest, but there were no studies to back him up. Twenty years later, Boas cut off prey's blood flow to the heart, brain, and other vital organs by closing blood vessels and sending pressure in the arteries plummeting. The animals pass out in seconds and die relatively quickly, It wasn’t pleasant work coming to that conclusion. Researchers anesthetized 24 rats, put ECG electrodes and vascular catheters into their bodies to monitor heart rate and blood pressure, then watched as they were squeezed by nine boa constrictors. After six seconds, a rat's blood circulation dropped by half. "I remember being in the room and the students were looking at the data in disbelief that it happened that fast. The oxygen supply was eliminated within the next minute as the rat's heartbeat began to falter. After six minutes, more than 90% of the rats had died, likely from irreparable heart damage as their veins were crushed, though they were probably unconscious from the first seconds.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avtZJKydB-E
