Angry Wasp Interrupts A Cannibalistic Snake Eating Another Snake In A Video

A video of a poisonous snake apparently being stung by a wasp while trying to eat another snake has shown just how wild Florida can be.

Evangeline Cummings, the assistant provost, and director of the University of Florida Online shot footage of a venomous coral snake trying to eat a rat snake while it was being attacked by a wasp in her backyard. She shared the video on Twitter trying to understand what exactly was going on.

“I need your support to process this,” she said in the tweet.

In the footage, the coral snake bites into the dead rat snake, as both of them hung from the branches of a rose bush. Enter the wasp, which lands on the coral snake and apparently stings it, making the coral snake whip and thrash about in an attempt to get the wasp off from its back.

Users who saw the tweet identified the wasp as a Yellowjacket wasp, however, they were not sure whether the wasp actually stung the snake or not. Questions were also raised by Cummings and the others as to how the snakes ended up hanging from a thorny rose bush.

“Don’t know how rat snake got there. Dropped by a hawk? So many questions. And how does a coral snake climb the thorny rose bush!?!” Cummings wrote on Twitter.

After some discussions and comments, Twitterati concluded that the dead rat snake was indeed dropped by a hawk or something similar, and the coral snake’s determination to get its prey made it climb the rose bush.

Another video footage which Cummings shot sometime later on the same day, shows the coral snake making a second attempt to eat the rat snake, this time craning all the way up from the ground.

Cummings had come out after seeing the rose bush move on its own again, when she saw the coral trying to eat the rat snake again. The wasp too was hanging around, maybe trying to sting the snake once again.

According to National Geographic, eastern coral snakes frequently dine on other coral snakes, rats, lizards, frogs, and other smaller snakes.