The sound of a rattlesnake's rattle is perhaps the most frightening sound you could hear on a hike. But how and why do these snakes make this iconic noise?
"Everything tells us that they rattle to alert predators," David Pfennig, a professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Live Science. Rattlesnakes may seem like fearsome creatures, but they are not at the top of the food chain. When a predator or a beast that could trample it — like a coyote or a bison, respectively — approaches, the rattle warns the predator to stay away or else it might get the fangs.
