7 April 2026
Heads up: If you don’t like snakes you won’t want to look at this. đŽ
Perhaps you’ve seen a garter snake stand up to look over the grass.
But this small feat is nothing to what this snake did at the zoo. Eventually it swayed too far to the left and … plop.
How do snakes do this?
To find out, scientists studied three brown tree snakes and a scrub python moving on a path with a vertical gap in the middle. At first the gap was 12 inches and each snake easily moved up to the higher level. For subsequent runs, the vertical gap was increased until the snakes had to stand straight up to reach the higher one 31 inches away.
The brown tree snakes could reach the upper perch even when the vertical distance exceeded 50 percent of their total body length. The scrub pythonâs climbing abilities were even more impressive, exceeding 70 percent of its total body length.
— Smithsonian Magazine
Here’s one of the snakes running the course. Watch what he does.
After collecting the data …
The researchers used mathematical modeling to make sense of the snakesâ gravity-defying feats. The animals probably focus their muscle activity on a âboundary layerâ at the base of their bodies near the lower perch, the team found. When the snake holds the part of its body above the âboundary layerâ in an upright, nearly straight position, gravity has little leverage to pull the creature down.
âCurvature and muscular activity are large near the lower perch where the snake turns upwards, while in regions where the snake is vertical, no muscular forces are required since the gravitational torque vanishes there,â the researchers write in the paper.
Getting into the vertical pose doesnât seem to require much energy. But holding the pose appears to be much more demanding, which is probably why snakes sway a bit when theyâre upright.
— Smithsonian Magazine
And that swaying is why the zoo snake fell down.