Rolling Snakes Reinvent The Wheel

For eons, roly-polies have rightfully dominated the rolling space, at least in our imagination. The crustaceans' astonishing ability to transform from a legged arthropod into a perfect sphere, a behavior called volvation, earned the bugs their nickname. But the bugs are far from the only rollers in the animal kingdom. Pangolins, hedgehogs, echidnas, and armadillos do it too, curling up their bodies into defensive balls. So does the Venezuelan pebble toad, which tucks in its head and tumbles down slopes to escape tarantulas. The Mount Lyell salamander rolls too, coiling itself into a wheel and bouncing down steep rocks. None of these animals become quite as Platonic a sphere as the roly-poly, but they do well enough. But becoming a ball is not the only way to roll. The dwarf reed snake has found another way to roll away from danger, not by becoming a ball but by becoming something like a hoop. This peculiar motion, the mechanics of which are analyzed in a new paper in Current Biology, raises an important question: What is more sinister, a snake slithering in the grass or a snake rolling itself like a possessed wheel?

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