Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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If you want to protect your favorite public media programming and podcasts like this one, visit AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action to learn how you can help. One more time, that's AmericanPublicMedia.org slash action. Thanks so much for standing up for public media. From the brains behind Brains On, this is the moment of um. And guess what? It's snake week. Um, um, um.
Moment of Up comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Cece the dog, and I'm fetching. Um...
I love playing fetch. Seriously, it's the best game ever. Mom throws the stick. It goes through the air. Then I find it and I bring it back. Every time it's like a whole new game. Will she throw it really hard? Will she fake me out and throw a bunch of nothing? Will I pretend to bring it back to her and then run away with it? Who knows? Okay, here we go. Come on, mom. Just throw it already. Yes, yes. Wait, where is it?
I thought she threw it over here in the weeds, but I can't find it. Oh, here it is. I think you are mistaken. I'm Esther, and I'm a snake. Whoa, sorry. I thought you were a stick. Yeah, I get that a lot. Last week, a human tried to use me as a marshmallow roasting stick. The next day, a bird tried to pick me up to build a nest.
Sometimes I wonder why couldn't I be shaped like something cool, like a sports car or an ice cream cone. Yeah, what are you shaped that way? I just met a new friend at the dog park the other day that was wondering about this too. Hi, my name is Ido from Tel Aviv, Israel. And my question is, why are snakes shaped like a stick? Why are snakes shaped like a stick?
If you're walking around and you see a snake that's stretched out and blends in with the ground and kind of looks like a stick, it might be doing that. It might have frozen as it walked because it's hoping that you as a predator won't see it or that a bird predator won't see it. Sometimes they actually will make their body kind of kink slightly so it's not perfectly straight, which causes them to look even more like an imperfect stick and blend in even a little bit more.
I'm Emily Taylor. I'm a professor of biological sciences at Cal Poly, which is a university in San Luis Obispo, California.
When snakes move really fast, they often move with that S-shaped locomotion. It's called lateral undulation. But a snake that's moving forward really slowly uses something else where it just can go perfectly straight as it slowly contracts the muscles of its belly and pulls itself forward. So it can maintain that sneaky, straight, stick-like appearance as it moves.
Snake locomotion is amazing. They have these muscles that go straight down their bodies and then another layer of muscles that go around their bodies like rings. And by contracting those in wave-like contractions down the body, they're basically pulling little sections of their body forward and then dragging the
the part behind them behind it. And that causes the whole snake eventually to move forward really, really, really slowly. We are vastly inferior to snakes in so many ways. And one of those is that we cannot crawl on our bellies easily because guess what? We have limbs for our locomotion. They don't. So they've figured out over evolutionary time how to move efficiently without limbs. Um, uh,
That is so awesome, Esther. You should be proud of being stick-shaped. It allows you to move quickly in an S-shape or move slowly like kind of a line. And you do it all without arms or legs. And if you look like a stick, you can hide from predators right under their noses. Huh. I guess you're right. This is like my superpower. Ah!
Finally, here it is. My actual stick. I gotta go. But do you want to hang out tomorrow? Maybe watch a movie? Yes. How about my favorite movie of all time? The 2006 blockbuster starring Samuel L. Jackson, Snakes on a Plane. If you liked this episode, take a second to subscribe to Moment of Um wherever you listen to podcasts.
And if you like epic debates, check out the Smash Boom Fast Podcast where we have a whole episode all about dogs versus cats. If you have a question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brandson.org slash contact. See you the next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then. Can you pass the popcorn?