This Tiny Snake Escapes Danger by Doing Cartwheels

A tiny snake escapes danger by doing cartwheels, and scientists have finally figured out how it pulls off the trick. New high-speed footage shows the dwarf reed snake tucking its body into a rolling hoop that reaches about eight miles per hour, roughly four times faster than the animal can slither, while keeping its head pointed steadily forward the whole time.

The work was published this month in the journal Current Biology by a team led by Yosuke Kojima of Toho University in Japan. The researchers studied thirteen dwarf reed snakes across three species, filming them from multiple angles in laboratory trials to decode a getaway that is over too quickly for the naked eye to follow, ZME Science reported.

The maneuver starts with the snake curling into a tight C-shape and lifting its head off the ground. Its tail then whips out behind it, briefly launching the animal into the air, and the body arches forward over the head. When the tail touches down in front, the next roll begins. Through it all, the snake keeps its head stable and facing the direction of travel, a feat of coordination for an animal with no arms or legs.

Four times faster than slithering

The cameras clocked the snakes rolling at up to nearly three point seven meters per second. All thirteen snakes performed the rolling behavior, while six related reed snakes used for comparison did not roll, which suggests the trick is a specialty of this particular group rather than a general snake skill, according to ZME Science.

Finding test subjects was not easy. The snakes measured just eleven to twenty-eight centimeters long and spend their lives hidden under leaves and soil in the forests of Southeast Asia, feeding on earthworms and insect larvae. The team collected its animals from Kubah National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia, during field seasons in 2019 and 2022, after a colleague first witnessed a snake escape danger this way in the wild, according to DongA Science.

That a snake escapes danger four times faster by rolling than by slithering makes the behavior worth the effort, since cartwheeling is not cheap. Earlier research found the maneuver so energetically expensive that the snakes tire quickly, suggesting it is reserved for moments of extreme threat.

Why roll instead of slither

Speed is only part of the story. Researchers believe the cartwheel also startles and confuses predators, buying the snake a head start that plain fleeing might not. The behavior may have evolved from a thrashing motion other snakes use to startle attackers, a simpler version of the same idea: be too weird to eat.

The rolling escape was first formally documented in 2023, when biologists described a dwarf reed snake of the species Pseudorabdion longiceps cartwheeling away from a perceived threat in the journal Biotropica. That study was led by Evan Quah of Universiti Malaysia Sabah, who noted that anecdotal reports of rolling in other small snakes keep surfacing, hinting the talent may be more widespread among secretive forest species.

"The movement is so fast that it would probably be impossible to understand how it works with the naked eye," Kojima told ZME Science. "The video analysis allowed us to measure the speed, reveal that the snakes keep their heads relatively stable, and understand the complex series of movements that make this head stabilization possible," he said, according to ZME Science.

Evolution is weirder than the textbook

For readers, the takeaway is delightfully simple: the animal kingdom keeps inventing locomotion that sounds made up. Most snakes slither, a few can glide between trees, and this one turns itself into a wheel. The same run of science news that decoded the cartwheel also delivered an antimatter trap holding a single particle for months and a hidden switch inside killer immune cells — precision machinery turning up where least expected, from two blind fish and a plant lost for two centuries to a reptile doing gymnastics.

And the story may not be over. Quah suspects other small snakes cartwheel too, especially close relatives of the dwarf reed snake, but their reclusive habits make them hard to catch in the act. The next time a snake escapes danger by rolling away, in other words, it might be a species science has never seen do it before.