Imagine: you walk into a spa, prepared to get a nice relaxing rubdown, and what does your masseur turn out to be but a 20 foot Burmese python?! Total chill-killer, right? Maybe not -- apparently visitors to the Cebu City Zoo in the Philippines just love being buried under a pile of snakes.

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The case of the Clarion Nightsnake (absolutely not pictured above) is somewhat of a controversy in the snake-expert community. The eighteen inch nocturnal species was discovered in the first half of the 19th century and then struck from the scientific record, only slithering back into the public eye after its rediscovery was announced last Friday.

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We are not as cool as most aquatic animals with the ability to filter saltwater and provide ourselves with fresh drinking water whenever needed. Even though the assumption is that most sea creatures, like turtles, have this awesome ability, it turns out that yellow-bellied sea snakes have one that's quite rare: surviving severe dehydration.

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In case you were sleeping well at night, not at all afraid of giant serpents slingshotting through your bedroom window - surprise! There are a whole bunch of snakes that can fly, and we've had no idea how. Luckily, these snakes are mostly in Southest Asia, and scientists have just figured out their secret. It's not Slytherin-related. Probably.

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Not too long ago we learned that turtles can live happy healthy lives with two heads, and now we know that a snake's head will bite its body right before dying. If you didn't think snakes could be more horrifying, check out this video and get ready to be proven wrong. I highly suggest listening to "Snake Eater" while watching.

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The one room in the home that most people can count on for a little privacy has in recent weeks become a nightmare place. Animal attacks, once one of many good reasons to avoid going outside, have moved into bathrooms around the world. In Israel, the latest attack saw a man minding his own business at a toilet rudely interrupted when a snake bit his penis, which might be the only situation to occur in a men's room that is more awkward than that guy who tries to start a conversation while you're both taking a leak.

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It's starting to look like it's possible that Florida's much-ballyhooed invasion by ravening hordes of Burmese pythons may have been a bit overblown. While officials cry out that hundreds of thousand the animals are invading the state, turning places like the Everglades into nothing more than enormous python spas, a month long python hunt in the state just came to a close telling a different story. 30 days of hunting by as many as 1,500 people registered snake hunters out to bag the most pythons netted an unexpectedly low total catch -- just 50 snakes.

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Invasive species can be bad times pretty much anywhere, but nowhere do they cause so much trouble as an island. In the closed environment of an island, just a couple of out of place animals can utterly transform an entire ecosystem. Invasive brown tree snakes in Guam have devastated populations of native birds that once dined on the island's spiders. With those birds on the ropes, Guam's spiders have taken the run of the place. The result is an arachnid population boom so serious that gaps in the island's tree canopy are now regularly filled with enormous spiderwebs. For every one spider on neighboring islands not afflicted by tree snakes, Guam now hosts up to 40 of the creepy crawlers, turning Guam from a tropical island paradise to a snake and spider dominated horror show right out of every Dungeon Master's dreams.

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Some snakes don't need a man to be a good mom -- they may not even need a man to make a baby, period. A study of copperhead and cottonmouth snakes suggests that males of the species may be less necessary than previously thought. Published this week in the journal Biological Letters, the study marks the first time virgin births have been seen in animals in the wild that normally breed sexually. Virgin births, in which the female supplies all of the genetic material for a child, have been seen in snakes in captivity before, so it's not surprising that it happens in the wild. What is surprising is the rate at which they occurred -- 1 in 22 births for copperheads, and 1 in 37 for cottonmouths. Those rates suggest that parthenogenesis -- the technical term for giving birth without having sex -- may be much more common in nature than predicted.

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Other lessons gleaned from this vital research:

• 94% of drivers are boring.
• You're way more likely to intentionally create roadkill if you drive a truck or SUV.
• Don't leave ponytailed guys alone with your rubber snake.

(via Mad Art Lab.)

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Why would you even do that?

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When Indian snake charmer Hakkul found that a plot of land he was promised was being held from him unless he bribed certain officials, he protested by leaving a writhing mass of snakes in a tax office in Uttar Pradesh, as one does. Hakkul needed the land to care for his writhing mass of snakes and apparently would have gotten it if not for corrupt officials. Among his writhing mass were several venomous cobras. Reportedly, no one was hurt during the protest.

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Wanna see something really cool? So do I. Here's a video of 53-year-old Liu Fei shoving poisonous snakes up his nose and looking kind of like Cthulhu. That's close enough, right?

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Not only are both geckos much larger than you probably thought geckos to be, but one of them is the best gecko friend any gecko could have and saves his buddy from a snake attack.

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You know how sometimes when you are driving, a wasp lands on your windshield and for the remainder of its existence on said windshield, "Please don't fly up through the air vents and kill me," is the only thing running through your brain? Well, what if that wasp was a snake? Not just hiding in a car engine this time.

(via Jalopnik)

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Probably high atop everyone's list of Totally Irrational Fears That Aren't That Irrational In Retrospect If They Actually Came True, is opening the toilet lid to see a huge snake staring back at you, probably eager to escape its watery prison once you helpfully lifted the lid. Worse: If you don't check before you sit down. Well, what if your car stopped running and you opened the hood to tinker with its mechanical guttyworks, only to see a humongous anaconda launch out at you? Because that happened. Right there in the above video.

(via Daily Picks and Flicks)

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