Frynta Daniel, Štolhoferová Iveta, Elmi Hassan Sh Abdirahman, Janovcová Markéta, Rudolfová Veronika, Rexová Kateřina, Sommer David, Král David, Berti Daniel Alex, Landová Eva, Frýdlová Petra
Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
Department of Biology, Faculty of Education, Amoud University, Borama, Somaliland.
Naturwissenschaften. 2024 Dec 4;112(1):1. doi: 10.1007/s00114-024-01952-2.
Fear of snakes is common not only in humans but also in other primates. Consequently, snakes are salient stimuli associated with prioritized attention, early detection and emotional significance. This has been interpreted as an adaptive evolutionary response of the primate brain to a risk of envenoming by a hidden snake. However, the struggle between mammals and snakes is not one-sided. Humans and carnivores regularly kill snakes, and thus snakes develop deterring defensive behaviour that may directly evoke enhanced fear. Here, we show that snakes depicted in threatening posture evoked on average more fear than those in resting posture. Significantly, African (Somali) and European (Czech) respondents considerably agreed on the relative fear elicited by various snakes. Nonetheless, not all defensive postures are equally efficient. Threatening cobras were perceived as top fear-evoking stimuli, even though most of them are not considered very frightening in resting posture. This effect can be attributed to their conspicuous hooding posture which evolved into an efficient warning signal for mammalian predators. Our result demonstrates that cobras are more effective than other snakes in the ability to evoke human fear by a simple behavioural display-hooding. This can be primarily explained by the behavioural evolution of cobras which successfully exploited pre-existing cognitive mechanisms of mammals. Whether human ancestors cohabiting with deadly venomous cobras further improved their fear response to hooding is uncertain, but likely.
对蛇的恐惧不仅在人类中很常见，在其他灵长类动物中也很常见。因此，蛇是与优先关注、早期检测和情感意义相关的显著刺激物。这被解释为灵长类大脑对隐藏蛇类造成中毒风险的一种适应性进化反应。然而，哺乳动物和蛇之间的斗争并非单方面的。人类和食肉动物经常捕杀蛇，因此蛇会发展出威慑性的防御行为，这可能会直接引发更强的恐惧。在这里，我们表明，以威胁姿态描绘的蛇比以休息姿态描绘的蛇平均引发更多的恐惧。值得注意的是，非洲（索马里）和欧洲（捷克）的受访者对各种蛇引发的相对恐惧程度有相当大的共识。尽管如此，并非所有的防御姿态都同样有效。威胁性的眼镜蛇被视为最能引发恐惧的刺激物，尽管它们中的大多数在休息姿态时并不被认为非常可怕。这种效果可以归因于它们显著的 hooding 姿态，这种姿态已演变成对哺乳动物捕食者的一种有效的警告信号。我们的结果表明，眼镜蛇通过简单的行为展示——hooding，比其他蛇更能有效地引发人类的恐惧。这主要可以通过眼镜蛇的行为进化来解释，它们成功地利用了哺乳动物预先存在的认知机制。与致命的有毒眼镜蛇共同生活的人类祖先是否进一步增强了他们对 hooding 的恐惧反应尚不确定，但很有可能。 （注：原文中“hooding”可能是一种特定的行为姿态描述，此处直接保留英文未翻译，因为不清楚准确对应的中文表述）
