Andrew Hull was driving through New South Wales, Australia when he came upon an exciting and unexpected predator-prey moment. Naturally, he took a video and shared it on Facebook.



“So I'm driving up the river road from Wilcannia,” Hull recalled, “composing a poem for Ian Marr, heart full of the bush, the autumn sun, and the wide red road, upon which lay a sizeable brown snake eating a bearded dragon.”

“I thought ‘bugger me - Australia!!’ Then thought 'the only thing this scene needs is a barefoot bogan to film it on his phone and stick it on Facebook'....So I did,” Hull wrote on Facebook.

The home ranges of Australia’s eastern brown snakes and western brown snakes overlap in the northwestern part of New South Wales where this video was captured. Both can grow over 1.5 metres (5 feet) in length, and both are extremely venomous, possessing powerful neurotoxins that target the nervous systems of their victims. (Not to be confused with North America’s brown snake, which is tiny and harmless!)

These snakes are known to be highly dangerous to humans, though they much prefer to save their deadly cocktails for their prey, which can include small mammals, birds, and – as you can see in this video – lizards.

Bearded dragons have several tricks up their sleeves to avoid predators. They are covered in unappetising-looking spikes, often coloured to match the soil of their homes, and when threatened can flatten themselves against the ground making it harder for predators to nab them. None of this seems to have helped this particular lizard, however.

Header image: Alexandre Roux