Cited research: ISME J. doi:10.1038/ismej.2010.71 (2010)

For pythons, indulging in a meal not only distorts physique, it also reshapes microbial communities living in the gut.

Most studies of gut microbes focus on animals that eat frequent, small meals, but Rob Knight at the University of Colorado in Boulder and his colleagues wanted to know how the microbes respond to more extreme intakes. The team decided to study the Burmese python (Python molurus), which may have only one meal in a month.

After 30 days of imposed fasting, juvenile pythons tucked into rodent meals weighing one-quarter of their own body mass. Within three days of the meal, gut microbe populations shifted drastically: overall species diversity increased, and bacteria of the phylum Firmicutes began to outnumber those of the Bacteroidetes, which had dominated during the fast. H.L.