SciShow Tangents - Snakes

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Snakes get a bad rap. Sure they’re slithery, venomous, silent killers… but they have some nice qualities, too! We don’t talk about many of those nice qualities in this episode, but they do exist. Head to https://www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscriber Garth Riley for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen[Trivia Question]Gliding snakes jumping or nothttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21816808/https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44950[Fact Off]Kukuri snakes disembowelhttps://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/639331https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/881934https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvmk_PDzKwhttps://snakesarelong.blogspot.com/2012/06/snakes-that-chew-their-food.htmlPython heart growing and shrinkinghttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16002308/https://www.nature.com/articles/434037a?proof=thttps://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/python-heart-food-news-animalshttps://cob.silverchair-cdn.com/cob/content_public/journal/jeb/211/24/10.1242_jeb.023754/3/3767.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3383835/https://www.livescience.com/16764-python-hearts-treat-human-cardiac-disease.html[Ask the Science Couch]Snake locomotionVideos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDDha9MxIDob8lOcy8UMC1g/videoshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7391877/https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/221/4/jeb166199/33944/Crawling-without-wiggling-muscular-mechanisms-andhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180112132922.htm  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/invasive-brown-tree-snakes-stun-scientists-amazing-new-climbing-tactic-180976728/[Butt One More Thing]Snake cloaca “farting”https://www.cabi.org/isc/FullTextPDF/2006/20063121845.pdfhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1565572.pdf?casa_token=hasRmCpaVigAAAAA:PfR7INW6TS-UeKo3iImOG4qx-AI1nj82C6GvjKI0k8TRFtFv7VhADtbPnZZWEkU47AlmGJrFMF8b5Mk8P8MaAhfg6vdE6w5NqDhgil_8fyqYwzIDZA 

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the Lightly Competitive Knowledge Showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green. And joining me as always this week is science expert Sari Riley. Hello. And our resident everyman Sam Schultz. Hello. I need to ask you two for tips on how to stay cozy during this very long Montana winter that is just beginning because there's so much of it left and I don't want it.

Today was the first day that I remembered that it gets so cloudy here. And I just feel like complete shit for a couple months. It got really cloudy and you were like, wait, this is what's supposed to happen for months. Yeah. Yeah. I forget every time. But just don't ever leave your house. There's one tip for you.

I feel like that's a bad one. I feel like the opposite. Yeah. I don't know if that counts as a bad one. I feel like the opposite. I don't know if that counts as cozy. Oh, I hate leaving my house. Oh, wow. Okay. My rule is I have to let my body see unfiltered sunlight at least once per day. Oh, I have a yard I can walk into.

My yard counts as my house. Yeah. Walk out, as long as it's not through a window. Like you actually breathe the air and the sun hits your skin and you're like, cool. Got it how long for oh just one deep breath one oh wow one deep breath that's not very many sir i'm gonna suck this outside in and i'm gonna take it inside with me this one breath of outside hmm yeah i'm not good at staying cozy i don't ever bundle up enough when I'm outside or anything like that

I've got a pretty cozy coat the other thing that I have is I don't know 12 like loose blankets just around I'm never more than 10 feet away from a blanket in my house that's probably the real secret

is this a universal experience? Have you ever been sleeping over at a friend's house and they didn't have blankets enough for you? And so you had to like put a bunch of pillows and towels on you? Or is this just me? No, I've had this experience too. The towel, nothing is sadder than sleeping beneath a towel

that doesn't quite cover your feet if you're tall. I would rather just go blanketless than even attempt. It would get so cold at night because it would be like Florida in the winter and nobody knows how to heat their homes. Oh, sure. And so you'd just be like, put a towel on and maybe lay a pillow across your feet.

Like, I don't need a pillow for my head. My feet are too cold. This is maybe a weird question, but I think about it. Would you rather have, if you must, if you have two little blankets, your top half covered by blanket or bottom half covered by blanket? I think top half. This is such an unpleasant question.

Feet get so cold. I think bottom half. I think if I could tuck my feet into something, I'd be okay. That's me. I got to tuck my feet into something. My top half can be a little chilly, but my feet need to be cozy for me to fall asleep. If I wake up and my shoulders are cold,

I like get visibly angry. I'm like, what happened here? And it happens a lot. I don't know why, but it happens a lot. Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I will

award as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari. What is a snake, guys? Kind of looks like nature made a mistake but it tries moves through grass with a little shake long wise warms itself on rocks at daybreak you know sunrise of mice and birds they can partake mostly pint size but some are huge and earn their king namesake like a prize their venom will make you ache or worse surprise your blood clots and you don't wake, a demise. But let's back up, pump the brake, and revise the image of the humble snake in our eyes, an ecosystem they can feed or break or catalyze, thoughts on how evolution's not fake, and there are ties to medicine and tech, the stuff we make.

It's wise to learn from them, not just take their disguise. So let's normalize curiosity about these opaque allies. Wow. Whoa. You found every single word that rhymes with snake and guys. Yep. And I was missing one for snake, so I had to use the word snake twice.

I tried my best. Wow. What a respectful ode to the snake. Which is the topic of today's episode snakes sari what are they i was trying to figure out if i knew but i feel like i kind of do like i gotta get i gotta guess and i think there's probably a pretty clear evolutionary branch that has all the snakes on it and then there are some things that look a lot like snakes but they're on the lizard branch and there are things that look a lot like snakes but

they're actually fish like eels and but there's like snakes are a pretty clear branch of the tree that all have like a universal one snake ancestor i don't know i didn't look into the evolutionary uh divergence it's possible that there's would there be convergent evolution the first snake so it's actually kind of hard to find the first snake because snake skeletons are small and fragile so fossilization is pretty uncommon so we can find more lizard skeletons and like progression toward the snake but we probably can't find snake great great grandma or anything like that but snakes are squamates uh squamata are the largest order of reptiles they are lizard snakes and worm lizards which are those fake snakes that you were talking about uh and they're all scaled

reptiles and then a suborder of that is serpentis and that is snakes specifically so like they're all scaled reptiles and then snakes are one of those groups and they are ectothermic so they don't generate internal heat They need to get it from their environment if they want to warm up. They are amniotes. So they like lay eggs. They're vertebrates. They don't always lay eggs, though. Do they?

Some of them have live birth. I know this because I once told people that either pythons or boa constrictors gave live birth. But I was wrong because it was the other one. And yeah, and like the big thing about them is that they have no front legs. And then some of them have a pair of like vestigial claws on the side of cloaca in place of back legs or just nothing back there. But these bony thorns are called anal spurs, which are used to grasp each other during mating. So that's all that Sari knows about snakes.

They're long and skinny, and they have butt spurs. Yeah. Some of them have venom. Some of them inject venom with their fangs. Some of them just have fangs. Some of them just have various mouth structures. And most of them are non-venomous and either just constrict or eat. Are they all like meat boys?

They seem like they got to all be meat boys. Probably. There's probably some article out there that's like the one vegetarian snake. There are 3,400 species of snakes, but there are no herbivorous snakes. Huh. Yeah. A snake could eat a banana so easily. We need to clue them into this.

Just be like, haven't you seen this? It would be no problem at all. It's perfect for, it's soft, it's snake shaped. Yeah. I want a banana right now. A snake eating a watermelon would be very funny yeah so we should tell them that uh-huh we should let them know i want to do it for the views sarah do you know what i did while you were telling us about snakes

what i gave a hundred dollars to the wikimedia foundation because it's december and it's time for our yearly support of wikimedia a a remarkable tool that is one of the only things left that's giving me hope in the Internet. So thanks, Wikipedia, for all of the work that you do. I don't think that any of what we do would be possible, certainly not as easy, without the wonderful work that all of the Wikipedians do. Thank you. So where's the word snake come from so snake and serpent come from the same root word basically the same root idea which is to crawl or creep and there are multiple proto-indo-european roots there's snag and also serp. But I feel like it's kind of like a jacket coat situation where some people used snake or words that sounded kind of like snake. Like there's like a lot of Swedish and Germanic.

But then serpent was words closer to serpent was more in old French or Latin. So like if you wanted to be fancy you called it a serpent and if you wanted to be just like regular you called it a snake and serpent used to be more popular for what you call this legless beast limbless reptile um but in more modern days snake has taken over for serpent just too A serpent's just too fancy. You'd be laughed right out of the room if you called them a serpent nowadays. Yes, but how would I be laughed into or out

of the room if I called them snags? I think everybody would applaud for you, welcome you with open arms. Yeah, I think so too. And that means that it is now time for the quiz portion of our show. This week, we're going to be playing a snake. So, snakes, they can live pretty wild lives. You probably have heard about that. And sometimes,

people even get to see those wild lives in action. Well, this past summer, a group of researchers teamed up to count observations of a specific event that involves snakes scouring academic journals, social media, and news sites for their analysis. So for today's Truth or Fail, I have three serpentine stories of what they were counting, but only one of them is the actual thing that they were counting. Which one is it? Were they counting, number one, the number of times that snakes have been observed getting eaten by spiders? Or was it fact number two, were they counting the number of times that snakes have been accidentally dug up by a test rover

at a Mars simulation site at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory? Or is it the third one, were the researchers counting the number of times that rattlesnakes have been found curled up inside fast food signs for warmth at night oh that's scary they're all scary so the mars rover one isn't too scary no yeah nobody's gonna get bit there there's it's a rover we're all good so it could be the snake eating spiders that they were counting it could be uh the number of snakes found by a rover or it could be fast food coziness

with a number of snakes hiding inside of a sign. Would be scary if they dug a snake up on Mars though. I don't know about scary. I think that'd be amazing. I'd be very, very excited. I'm not there. There's way, like I'm way more afraid of snakes that are here than on Mars.

The implications are chilling though. Ah, God. A snake eating a spider. That's illegal. The opposite way. Spider eating snake. Oh, snakes eat spiders all the time. What do I have a spider eating snakes?

Yeah, yeah. Spider just slurping them up like a spaghetti. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. I think probably they do it like anything else where they like wrap them up and then they liquefy the the thing inside of the little pouch and they suck it down i feel like there would only be a handful of spiders that could do this because of spider webs not being strong enough or like it needs to be one of those big bird catcher spiders

that's like bird catcher because we've seen it catch birds but it's actually like anything big so it's ambushing a snake instead of just trying to catch it in a web right i feel like there was a famous video like a big video going around a few months ago of a spider eating a snake huh why would you be watching it, Sam? Because my dad sends me every spider video he finds to make me extremely uncomfortable. The Mars Rover testing sites, I guess snakes would bury in sand.

Like, that makes sense. And I don't know. But would that be popping up on social media? Would they be scouring social media to figure that out? They'd just have to ask the people who worked at JPL, right? Mm-hmm, or whoever was doing the tests. Yeah. Maybe those JPL people don't write it down, they just tweet a lot.

Yeah, that's probably it. And then the fast food signs, that one makes the most sense to me. Yeah, me too. If I was in a desert, I would want to curl up somewhere warm. And what else but the glow of golden arches beckoning me. Would you tweet about it if you saw a snake suddenly pop out of a Taco John's sign? Yes. Yeah, no, I would make a TikTok.

I would tweet it. I would probably talk about it in a video. I would do all of the things. Yeah. And if you worked at Taco John's, you'd be like, check this out, guys. Open it up. Let all the snakes out. I think I'm going to go with the spider eating snakes.

Sam's going with spider eating snakes. Really? Because I think I'm being tricked because there was a video about this that I saw and maybe Deboki extrapolated. But if I saw a video, there's more. That's, you know, it's a thing. I'm still gonna go with fast food signs

because Sam's dad doesn't send me spider videos. So I simply don't know. Well, the good news for Sam is that indeed a lot of different spiders make meals out of snakes. At least 319 of them to be exact, based on a meta-analysis published in the Journal of Arachnology. Now, this is not individual species. This is individuals.

A third of these observations came from documented in journals. The rest came from news and social media sites. In total, they found that spiders have eaten snakes on every continent except Antarctica. Eighty percent of the observations were made in the u.s and australia though 80 is that you said 80 yeah this is more of us taking pictures and posting on social media here probably um some spiders could uh take down snakes that were 10 to 30 times their size the largest snake that got eaten was over a meter long but most of the snakes were young, freshly hatched little baby snakes.

And their biggest nemesis was the black widow spider, which has both very strong venom and very strong silk. And that helps when it comes to catching big prey. The bigger snakes were all killed by orb weavers or tarantulas. And the most commonly eaten snakes were garter snakes and rat snakes, uh are just because there's a lot of them around probably wrote more than their size now as for the martian snakes so there's a there's a mars yard uh at jpl and it is made out of like you know the southwestern rocks and stuff and they do sometimes find snakes there uh but they don't apparently i don't think that they've ever like dug one up they weren't like they haven't been surprised by one as for there, but they don't. Apparently, I don't think that they've ever like dug one up.

They weren't like they've been surprised by one. As for fast food signs, I don't have any good data on fast food signs, but I do have good data on the fact that during the beginning of the pandemic, they parked a bunch of airplanes in the Mojave Desert because they didn't need them. And they were like, let's keep them here. But the engineers had to, like, you know, keep the planes healthy and running and making sure that they were operational for when things started working again. And they did quickly find that around the tires specifically and the brakes of the planes,

rattlesnakes would be like, this is a nice spot for me. And so they quickly had to improvise some strategies, which mostly involved banging on things with brooms. Very scientific. So Sam is going into the break with a 1-0 lead. Next up, it'll be the break and then the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. It's time for the fact off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind.

After they have presented their facts, I will judge which one would make a better TikTok, and then I will choose that one and probably give it some number of points that will alter the outcome of the game or not. Who knows? But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. Are you ready? Yeah. So for animals with no limbs,

snakes are pretty impressive travelers. Some tropical tree snakes can jump and fly from tree to tree by flattening their bodies down and undulating wildly through the air. But they don't always jump at takeoff. So how much farther does a snake glide

after a jumping takeoff compared to a non-jumping takeoff? And this is like, not in meters, but in like how much further in like percentage or like multiples. Okay.

So sometimes they're just flopping off the tree and sometimes they're boing? Yeah, correct. Okay. So sometimes they're just flopping off the tree and sometimes they're boing? Yeah, correct. Okay. How much can a snake boing? How much could a boing snake boing? I think it can go twice as far.

Twice as far. Twice as far, Sari says. I think they can go one fourth as far. It doesn't matter, Sam, because Sari got it right on the nose. They're good at boinging, huh? Exactly. Exactly two times. Wow.

Amazing. Sorry I interrupted you. But look, we got things to do. We got facts to fact. Well, congratulations, Sari. That means you get to decide who goes first. Thank you. Sam, since you're so confident, first oh no so snakes don't have a lot of ways to separate their prey

into discrete easy to swallow pieces like claws or jaws full of teeth made for ripping and chewing stuff up so many of them famously swallow their prey whole and for the animal being swallowed whole that is probably unpleasant enough to begin with, since as far as I can tell, animals tend to get swallowed alive and asphyxiate

inside of the snake. Sure. Which sucks. But in 2020, a team of researchers confirmed another even more sucky way that a species of snake

eats its prey. The Asian kukri snake generally eats toads, big lumpy toads. And sometimes when they are eating these toads according to video footage studied by this team the snake will cut the toad's belly open with a specialized cutting tooth insert its head into the still living toad and start thrashing around in a

death roll similar to an alligator's death roll why so after rolling for a while uh the snake will start eating the toad's guts one at a time. And the death roll is kind of a misnomer because it does not, in fact, kill the toad. Since the toads being eaten alive have been observed to be alive for four hours during the process of being eaten. And instead, they think that the role might be to loosen up the toad's guts or to, quote, force the guts out of the toad's bodies. But the researchers aren't really sure. That's not the only thing that they're not really sure about because the snakes have also been seen eating the toad's whole.

So it's sort of unknown why sometimes they eat the toad's one organ at a time. Oh, I know exactly why. Well, okay. Tell me why. Tell me why. Well, it's because they're full and they don't want a whole tote. It's like when you go to Chipotle and you're like, I can't do that. So you open your burrito up and you sort of eat a little bit of it from the inside.

Just have a little snack. Yeah. And then wrap it up and save the rest for later. Yeah. You don't want the whole tote burrito. You just want the filling. That's a great hypothesis. There's another hypothesis that it could be to spread out the dosage of the toxins that snake gets from certain toads.

But they have also been seen eating toads that are known to be poisonous whole. So that might not be why. It's probably just that the snake knows how much it can swallow at once. And so it eats larger toads gut by gut. But the snakes have also been observed doing the cut the belly open, stick your head in death roll maneuver to toes that they end up swallowing whole. So they might just be assholes and like doing it or something like that. And in 2021,

they found two other species of kukri snake that feed this exact same way. So it's just this whole family of weirdo snakes. And this can be an inadmissible little bonus fact in your final decision. But I was curious if there were other snakes that ate their food in weird ways like that. And it kind of seems like there aren't. There aren't very many other snakes that eat their food one little bit at a time instead of whole. But there are a kind of snake called the crab eating water snake and they eat crabs.

And what they do is they flip the crabs upside down and eat their legs off one at a time and they might even have uh modified molar like teeth to help them chew the crab legs because they have like yeah they have teeth marks on them when they take them out their stomach it is a crab leg so it does not seem like it would be particularly easy to get done no oh boy oh man ah I'm looking at one. Are you watching him do it? I just, he's got a big old crab leg in his mouth. Oh, that guy. Yeah.

And then there's also a video of the guys with their heads in the toads flipping them all over the place. Oh, yeah. I haven't watched that yet. But well, Sari, you've got a challenge to overcome, though I will say, I don't know if I want to tell people about this because it is terrible. It's kind of sad. You really got to wiggle those boys around.

Yeah, and toads ain't never hurt anybody. They're just minding their own business. You don't want to be taking a TikTok of a snake thrashing in the background. No, I don't think I could put the video on it I don't like I you know you can give the warning um but

I made a miscalculation yeah well too violent too violent I don't know we'll see we'll see maybe series will

will be they do that except it's with like puppies or something yeah yeah something even horror

no mine is also about eating though um but different snake that's kind of most of what they do, really. Yeah. It's a lot of it.

Most of the interesting stuff about them. I'm going to talk about Burmese pythons, which are fairly iconic in the snake world because they've got that tan and black snake skin pattern. And they can grow really big, over 5 meters or 16 feet long. And they're an invasive species in the Floridaida everglades because of humans being dumb and these danger noodles can eat um so they're one of the non-venomous snakes and hunt by constricting prey until it can't breathe or passes out so they can swallow it whole and a lot of the clickbait you see involve uh burmese pythons swallowing ridiculously huge creatures that are about the same body mass as

them, like deer or alligators. These massive meals require them to stretch ligaments in their jaws and skin in a kind of grotesque eating feat, and then they don't need to eat again for months. But what's even more remarkable biologically, in my opinion, is what's going on at a cellular level during these feasts and famine. For example, a malnourished python's intestine is pretty sparse, with thin, barely there cell layers and short microvilli because they don't need much surface area to absorb all that nothing in their body. But as soon as they snag a meal, their metabolic rate can skyrocket up to 44 times. Within 24 hours, the intestinal cells increase in surface area, width, and mass,

and in less than a week, there's as much as an 80% increase in intestinal cell count. Other organs swell too, like their liver to filter blood, their pancreas to pump out enzymes, and, most weirdly to me, their heart, in a process that's known as cardiac hypertrophy. So in a 2005 study, Python's heart muscle mass increased by about 40% within 48 hours to pump blood and oxygen and nutrients around and help get all the gastric juices flowing. And if I'm doing my math estimate correctly, I've never seen a python heart, but I think their heart goes from somewhere around the size of a grape to a strawberry, which is like big when it's that small. But like a slightly larger than average strawberry.

So we're talking significant. And in a 2011 study, scientists deduced that what causes this massive organ growth spurt is really fatty blood. In fact, when they drew blood from the recently fed pythons, it was cloudy because of all the lipid molecules floating around, especially myristic, palmitic, and palmitoleic acids. Something weird is going on with this particular biological cocktail because when the researchers took this trio of fatty acids and infused it into an unfed python's blood. It stimulated heart growth the same

amount as if the python fed or if they infused blood plasma from a fed python. And in most mammals, a huge jump of lipids in the blood like this would probably lead to some sort of buildup or disease. But these infusions even stimulated heart muscle growth in living mice, not liver or skeletal muscle growth, though. I mean, I was going to ask, should I drink the fat snake blood? I don't think you should drink it, but you should get an IV drip of it. I think I will. And then your heart will swell. Inject this into your body.

Yeah, and then I'll suddenly be a sportsman. No, sportsman is a different thing. What is it called? An athlete. An athlete. You'll be a good sport. You're going to need a lot of snake athlete. It'll be a good sport. You're going to need a lot of snake blood. It'll be a good sport.

The fact that it affects a mouse's organs is very weird. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And that's as far as they took the experiments. So I think they still have a lot of questions because I still have a lot of questions. They should have kept going. If this was 100 years ago, they would all be shooting up snake blood.

This mouse is too strong now. And they say that this could be useful not only just like in understanding how lipids boost organ growth and then like the snakes don't stay that way. It shrinks again depending on what they need. But human heart muscles are like really complicated to understand and we get conditions like hypertrophy that aren't great yeah like sometimes it is an athlete but sometimes it's negative and so we could learn a lot about heart muscle from the wildness of these snake hearts that's very cool i knew a lot of that about snake organ regrowth but the lipids in the blood is very weird one because like that's very cool i knew a lot of that about snake organ regrowth but the lipids in the

blood is very weird one because like that's something you usually don't want uh and two the fact that it that you can transfer that to another snake or even to a organism that is only very distantly related to the snake it's very cool i was definitely going to give sam the point until i heard that so instead i'm going to give you equal points which means that sam still comes out the winner. Oh, thanks. And that means it's time to ask the science couch where we've got

a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. It's from Emily 17 who asks, I know that there are a set number

of recognized snake locomotion strategies. Are they each suited for different things or do some snakes move in silly ways just because evolution was like why not uh dev is definitely not why not there's definitely good reasons for i can only i can only think of two but i'm sure that there are more than two what are the two you

can think of sidewinding uh is the weird one and then normal um which is how snakes move uh-huh yeah yeah sidewinding is specifically on sand and it just helps lift their bodies up so they don't have as many contact points with the ground because it's for like hot sand or because sand is slippery you don't want like your whole body to really mush in there otherwise you'll slip slide down so you can dig a little further in with the parts that are touching rather than everything being a little shallower yeah that's uh my understanding of the physics of sidewinding uh normal in fancy terms is called lateral undulation which makes sense because lateral is like sideways and then undulation is the wiggly and that is where all points along the length of the snake are in contact with the ground and have like are moving back and forth so it's used for rough ground anything where more grip

or surface area is helpful and possible so like this is they undulate while gliding the gliding snakes do it's also useful for water snakes so the ones that like travel on the surface of the water. A third type is called concertina locomotion. And so it's kind of like an accordion where half the snake moves and then the other half catches up. And so it's like the front half jumps forward and then the back half jumps up and the front half jumps forward and the back half jumps up. And so this is helpful for things like tunnels or climbing trees in a lot of ways because it's like big bursts of energy but it's also the least efficient method of locomotion because you have to like do these big bursts of power to get going a new one newly discovered is lasso climbing where a particular a couple snake species just like form a circle

around a pole and kind of like wiggle their way up what the heck they like form a loop and then climb which is extremely weird you can find videos of this and so there are more snake movements to be discovered but the one that i wanted to spend a little bit extra time on, even though it sounds boring, it's the one that scientists are generally most interested in, is rectilinear moving, also known as rib walking. So this is the kind of movement, like if you see in a big python, it's moving straight forward in a line. So instead of like slithering and S is like a snake, it just kind of like oozes forward yeah yeah and it's specialized muscles that are attached between their rib bones and the belly skin of the snake are like carefully controlled to like bloop forward in little in little goes but they got

little feet nubbies on their bellies. Yeah, they're just walking on their little snake feet. But it's like if instead of snake feet, they had like they were like a centipede down there because like each of their ribs has like a muscle attached to it. And it just kind of like blorps forward all equally. And they just kind of squish, squish forward, providing traction with the ground, but also like that forward momentum that becomes really fluid and seamless. And this is the one, if you've heard about snake-inspired robots to either go into pipes or to go on other planets where we're not sure what the terrain will be or to go into wreckage to look for whatever is in there, like to help rescue missions and things like that. This is the locomotion that they're studying because it's just like such a precise synchronization of muscle movement that can squeeze snakes through small spaces.

And it's apparently very complicated and very hard to mimic. But snake brains are just like, you know, I got this. I'm going to move in a straight line and then their muscles do all do all the rest that's that's the nice thing about being a snake is you don't have to or anything like you can throw me a ball and i'm not gonna do the calculus to figure out when it's gonna get to my hand i'll just hold my hand up because you're an athlete because i'm a

sportsman so the snakes have to pick one Can some snakes do multiple of these or? I think most snakes can switch between several of them. So one paper I was looking at, I think was looking at garter snakes. And they did lateral undulation. So like normal snake, concertina, locomotion, and the rectilinear. And it just depends on like what environment they need to navigate through and how much energy they're willing to expend. So it's not like you just pick one per snake.

It looks like fun to do snake movement. I feel like that would be fun. It doesn't seem like one of the things that I think, I don't know, it feels like this is part of what creeps me out about snakes is that it doesn't seem like it should work. It's like, how are you moving around so well? You don't have feet. How'd you get in a tree? How'd you get in a tree? You don't have hands. I can't climb a tree and I got like four limbs. That part does look fun. The eating big stuff to me has always looked like,

no thanks. I would just eat spaghetti if I was a snake. Very time consuming and unpleasant. Yeah. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShowTangents Patreon and ask us on our Discord. Thanks to

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the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. It might seem like snakes are all tail, but that is not true. There is a section toward the end of a snake where their stomach ends and their tail begins. And that is where their cloaca, or their waist vent, is. I don't know what that is. What it says. And some snakes, like the Sonoran coral snake and the Western hooknose snake, use their

cloaca for self-defense. They push air out of the vent to make a popping sound that deters predators. So basically, their self-defense mechanism is farting just like my son does he weaponize his farts uh i mean i don't think so but he does fart on me and laugh so it's not like it's not true self-defense but he is certainly enjoying it yeah well no one's eating him so it's working it's true