You've seen a snake fly, but have you ever seen one do a somersault? 8 little-known facts about snakes

When it comes to snakes, many people think of them as being long and thin, and even a little scary. In fact, there are as many as 3,900 known snake species, from the 10-centimeter-long Kara blind snake to the nearly 7-meter-long reticulated python. Snakes come in all sizes, and their different living environments have shaped their different habits.

In today's post, we have prepared some interesting facts about snakes . We hope you can see more sides of snakes here:

Little snake somersaults

Pseudorabdion longiceps, a small snake found in Southeast Asia and a member of the family Colubridae, somersaults away when frightened .

Snakes can also do somersaults (played at 0.25x speed here) | ARasky Outdoors

This is a small, non-venomous snake that usually hides among rocks and fallen leaves during the day and only comes out at night. Researchers have found that when disturbed, this snake will use its tail to lift its body into the air and then roll like a cartwheel to escape. Using this action, it can run 1.5 meters in 5 seconds.

Snake Flip Breakdown | Evan Quah

Actively tumbling is a very energy-consuming maneuver, and these snakes should only do it when they are seriously frightened . This small snake is often preyed upon by birds and other snakes, and the strange tumbling action not only increases its escape speed, but also serves to confuse predators.

Flying snakes

Although not truly flying, some snakes are very good at gliding in the air. They can glide for distances of more than 100 meters and can even turn in the air.

Paradise Golden Flower Snake (Chrysopelea paradisi) gliding through the air | Discovery UK

These "flying snakes" are from the Chrysopelea genus, with five known species living in the jungles of South and Southeast Asia. These snakes are arboreal, and gliding helps them move between tall trees . Although they have no wings or membranes at all, their gliding ability is even better than that of animals such as flying squirrels.

Golden flower snakes expand their ribs to change their body shape while gliding, thereby gaining more lift | Daniel Holden et al

When in the air, the golden snake will open its ribs to flatten the lower part of its body to gain more lift. At the same time, it will constantly twist its body horizontally and vertically to maintain its balance in flight.

Breathe as you want

Pythons often swallow large animals in one gulp, but they never choke because of it. This is because these snakes have a unique breathing skill, and they can control different parts of their body at will to breathe .

X-raying a Boa constrictor's breathing | John Capano

Unlike humans, snakes do not have diaphragms in their bodies. They rely entirely on the movement of their ribs to inhale air into their lungs. Studies have found that pythons can precisely control the movement of ribs in different parts of their bodies and can freely switch breathing movements between different rib segments . When they are at rest, they mainly use the ribs near the upper 1/3 of the lungs to breathe. When pythons strangle or swallow their prey and some of their ribs cannot move, they can switch their breathing movements to other parts so that their long lungs can always get enough oxygen.

Super strong swallowing

The image of a python swallowing a whole deer is very impressive, but its swallowing ability is not the strongest. Currently, the strongest swallowing champion in the snake world is the Gans egg-eating snake (Dasypeltis gansi). Although this snake is small in size, it has the largest mouth relative to its body size.

The huge mouth of Gans' egg-eating snake | Andrew Higley/BC Jayne

Snakes have separate jawbones, and the soft tissue in the middle can stretch, so they are very good at expanding their mouths to swallow food that is much thicker than themselves. The soft tissue in the mouth of the Gans' egg-eating snake is particularly strong in stretching. Its head is usually only about 1 cm wide, but when its mouth is fully opened, it can actually fit a cylinder with a diameter of up to 5 cm .

The highly retractable mouth helps Gans' egg-eating snakes swallow bird eggs easily . After swallowing the egg whole, they twist their spines to break the egg, squeeze out the egg liquid, and then spit out the flattened eggshell.

Choked to death by a centipede

However, even with its super swallowing ability, snakes can still choke to death - and they can be choked to death by giant centipedes!

The ringed rock snake (Tantilla oolitica) is the rarest snake in North America, and people have only seen it a few times in the wild. However, just last February, a tourist found a dead ringed rock snake in Florida, and it died in an embarrassing way - a long centipede stuck in its mouth .

Choked Rock Crested Snake | Drew Martin

The centipede that choked the ringed rock crown snake is also dead. CT scans show that it was only one-third the length of the snake, but it squeezed the snake's trachea, so the snake may have died of suffocation. Snakes often eat prey that is larger than themselves, and if the prey gets stuck in their throats, they can spit it out immediately; but the centipede is full of legs, so it is difficult to spit it out at once, and the snake may have choked to death accidentally .

The researchers also found some inconspicuous wounds in the snake's throat. Perhaps the centipede's stinger scratched the snake's throat , allowing venom to enter the snake's body and accelerate its death.

CT scan of a snake with a giant centipede in its throat | The Florida Museum of Natural History

Snake biologists are very excited because this is the first time they have found a specimen of a ringed rock snake that died while eating its prey. This unfortunate pair of snakes and centipedes will be included in the museum's specimen collection as a combined state.

Not very good at hearing

Do snakes have ears? Yes, but their ears are "simple versions".

The ear is usually composed of the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. Snakes do not have a complete outer ear and middle ear structure, but they have a middle ear bone and an inner ear. After receiving the sound, the middle ear will transmit the information to the inner ear through vibration, and then send it to the brain in the form of nerve impulses. In this way, snakes can hear low-frequency sounds . The frequency range they are best at receiving is generally 80 to 160 Hz, which is mainly transmitted through the ground. There are also studies showing that they can hear sounds up to 450 Hz transmitted through the air, which allows them to hear the voices of humans speaking.

Snake Ear Structure | Weebly

The frequency range of human hearing is 20 to 20,000 Hz, and the frequency range that snakes can hear is much smaller than that of humans. But this does not cause any problems for snakes, after all, they do not communicate with sound. The "hissing" sound that we are familiar with snakes is higher in frequency than what they can hear. Researchers believe that this sound is for birds and mammals to hear .

It doesn't matter if you don't have good hearing, snakes have a strong sense of smell to make up for it. Their tongues can capture odor molecules in the air, allowing them to use their keen sense of smell to detect prey. It is also because of their particularly sensitive sense of smell that most plants used to repel snakes have a strong smell.

Snakes also have clitorises

Like humans, snakes have a clitoris.

Snake clitoris | La Trobe University

Except for birds, vertebrates generally have a clitoris; but for the clitoris of snakes, it was not until 2022 that a study described the structure of the clitoris for the first time. In this study, scientists collected the bodies of 9 different snake species, carefully made a small incision near the snake's tail, observed the shape inside, and performed CT scans. The results showed that female snakes have bifurcated hemiclitoris, and the size and shape of the hemiclitoris vary among different snake families .

The penis of a North American rattlesnake | Mokele / Wikimedia Commons

Research on the female snake clitoris is just beginning, but the male snake penis has been studied for more than 200 years . Snake penises are called hemipenes, which are bifurcated structures that are hidden inside the body when not mating. Like the hemiclitoris, the penises of different snake species vary greatly, from a pair of toothpicks to a collection of spines and a complex, bulky structure.

Snakes need friends too

When we say snakes are cold-blooded animals, we are not only referring to their body temperature, but also their image as cold-blooded killers.

But scientists have discovered that cold-blooded killers also have a tender side. They connected a heart rate monitor near the heart of rattlesnakes and then locked them in a dark bucket. After 20 minutes, they continuously hit the side of the bucket and recorded the heart rate changes of the snakes in the bucket. The results showed that if there were companions of the same kind around, the heart rate changes of the snakes when facing the impact would be reduced, and the stress response would be much smaller than when the snakes were alone .

Social buffering experiment with rattlesnakes | References [9]

The study shows that if two snakes experience acute stress together, their mutual company can buffer stress and calm both of them more quickly, just as humans are calmer when facing stress in a group, a phenomenon known as "social buffering." Social buffering has been documented in many mammals, including humans; this is the first time a similar phenomenon has been discovered in reptiles, suggesting that their sociality may be more complex than we previously thought.

References

[1]https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ecy.3857

[2]https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/217/3/382/12998/Aerodynamics-of-the-flying-snake-Chrysopelea

[3]https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/facts/flying-snakes

[4]https://www.sciencenews.org/article/snakes-big-gulp-gans-egg-eater

[5]https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article-abstract/225/6/jeb243119/274764/Modular-lung-ventilation-in-Boa-constrictor

[6]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/btp.13213

[7]https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0281285

[8]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2022.1702

[9]https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ethology/articles/10.3389/fetho.2023.1181774/full

Author: Window knocks on rain, cat swallows

Editor: Mai Mai