screenshot from embedded video of Snake Standing Up by IFLScience on YouTube

7 April 2026

Heads up: If you don’t like snakes you won’t want to look at this. 😮

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 python’s climbing abilities were even more impressive, exceeding 70 percent of its total body length.

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 snakes’ gravity-defying feats. The animals probably focus their muscle activity on a “boundary layer” at the base of their bodies near the lower perch, the team found. When the snake holds the part of its body above the “boundary layer” in an upright, nearly straight position, gravity has little leverage to pull the creature down.

“Curvature 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,” the researchers write in the paper.

Getting into the vertical pose doesn’t seem to require much energy. But holding the pose appears to be much more demanding, which is probably why snakes sway a bit when they’re upright.

And that swaying is why the zoo snake fell down.

Read more in Smithsonian Magazine: How Do Snakes ‘Stand’ Upright Nearly Stick-Straight? New Research Points to How They Pull Off the Gravity-Defying Feat.