Snake Locomotion

Snakes are really cool animals. One of the ways that snakes can move is via a method called lateral undulation. lateral undulation means that there are waves of lateral bending along the body of the snake. There are a few unique things about this:

1. When a bend in the snake's body encounters an object on the surface, it exerts a force against the object and forms the part of its body nearest to it around the object.

2. When a snake encounters more than one object at the same time, it again exerts forces against the objects, but this time, the lateral forces cancel each other and the resulting force allows the snake to move forward.

3. The last cool thing is how snakes moving this way deal with friction. Snakes have backwards pointing scales. When they move backwards, they want friction but when they move forward, they don't.  Some parts of the snake's body don’t help to propel, they just get dragged - creating friction. To combat this, snakes lift up these parts when they move. You can see this below, there are some parts of the snake that aren't touching the ground.