African egg-eaters feed exclusively on eggs, a diet that has stripped away the usual snake toolkit. The jaws carry only a few vestigial teeth, and the mouth and neck skin are elastic enough to admit eggs much wider than the head. A hinge in the lower jaw and greatly reduced dentition allow the egg to pass without breaking on the way in.
The cutting apparatus sits inside. Ventral processes of about twenty-five to thirty neck vertebrae project into the oesophagus, capped in enamel-like tissue. Muscular contractions draw the egg back and forth against these hypapophyses until the shell fractures. The snake then compresses the egg, swallows the liquid, and ejects the shell as a folded, near-empty packet.
Because it cannot bite meaningfully, the egg-eater's defence is display. It rubs its keeled scales against each other to make a rasping hiss and adopts a striking posture, and its blotched pattern resembles that of the venomous saw-scaled vipers with which it shares much of its range.