How To Be A Snake [Life in Motion]

If you stroke a snake, its skin feels slick and slippery. Yet according to a new study by scientists at Georgia Tech, snakes actually depend on friction to move.

Snakes crawl by contracting the muscles that run along their body and pushing against the ground. Recently David Hu and his colleagues took a close look at that snake-surface interface. They anesthetized snakes and lay them on a board. By tipping one end of the board, they could see how well a snake’s body could hold onto the surface tha