Ever Wondered How Snakes Slither?

A team of physicists discovered the secret on how snakes slither.

16:53 15 March 2016

Ms Perrin Schiebel, a PhD student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US, has spent many months putting 10 Mojave shovel-nosed snake through their slippery paces in a sand-filled aquarium to understand how they slither.

 

"One of the things that's really interesting about snakes is that their entire body is, in this type of locomotion, in sliding contact with the ground," Ms Schiebel explains.

 

"So they have to be able to push off things in their terrain effectively, to overcome the fact that they've got these frictional drag forces on their stomach all the time."

 

"They can travel fairly substantial distances completely submerged. We think this body shape is an adaptation to that."

 

She then concluded: "What I've found... is that the snake is using a waveform that is beneficial for travelling quickly at the surface - and that all of these complex things, like the grains flowing away, or the tracks the snake makes, may not be important."