How can you not love an animal that does things a little differently? Like the dwarf reed snake, which doesn’t slither away from danger as quickly as every other snake. One day it developed the audacity to be different.
To flee the scene with some panache, with a little style, perhaps even a bit of goofiness that will probably make you laugh the second you see it in motion, because you see the dwarf reed snake choose to tumble like an Old West tumbleweed away from danger.
Knowing what it does and how goofy it looks still doesn’t prepare you for how ridiculous it looks when a snake rolls around like a runaway wagon wheel.
This Tiny Snake Can Cartwheel Four Times Faster Than It Can Slither
According to a study published in Current Biology, researchers at Japan’s Toho University used high-speed cameras to break down how this under-a-foot-long Southeast Asian snake achieves its ridiculous escape. Snakes have a whole loadout of traditional escape methods. That’s why some of them bite and are venomous; that’s why others rattle their tails.
The dwarf reed snake starts cartwheeling away like an idiot at nearly a foot per second, which turns out to be a rather efficient method of escape since it’s about four times faster than a standard snake’s ground-slithering escape
The snake pulls it off by whipping its tail left into the right side of its body while the flailing points at the ground, essentially pushing itself forward. By rotating its midsection in big alternating loops while keeping its head steady, the snake essentially turns itself into a wheel without an axle.
All its sensory organs stay upright and focused on the path ahead as it barrels away at high speeds, vaguely reminiscent of an F1 car’s tire careening down the track after a crash. But the tire is alive, and it eats earthworms.
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