The Year of the Snake – 25 snake facts for 2025!

    Green snake on a tree limb

    It’s that time of year again! The Chinese zodiac, used by several Asian countries including China, Thailand, and South Korea, operates on a lunar calendar, so the date of the new Lunar New Year varies each year but usually lands somewhere around late January or early February. This year’s turnover is January 29th, and with the end of the Year Of The Dragon in 2024 comes 2025, the Year Of The Snake! Depending on the version of the story, the reason the snake’s in its position might be because they used their cunning to hitch a ride with the Horse, the animal that came after them, or nepotism courtesy of the dragon: sometimes the snake lands in its prestigious position because it was the dragon’s nephew, cousin, or other relative. (You can read more about the story of the Great Race and why the animals have their years in my post from last year about the Year Of The Dragon.)
    People born in the Year Of The Snake are associated with cunning, intelligence, and calm, but can be arrogant or difficult to like at first appearance. To ring in the Year Of The Snake, I thought I’d share 25 fun facts about snakes, mythical and real alike.

    1. Along with the 12-year cycle of the animals, every Chinese zodiac year has a different associated element from the 4 Chinese classic elements: fire, water, metal, and wood. 2025 is the year of the Wood Snake.
    2. Just because you see a snake rattling its tail doesn’t mean it’s a rattlesnake! Rattlesnakes, vipers with specialized scales on the ends of their tails that make a loud noise to communicate with each other and alarm predators when they shake their tails, only live in the Americas. But shaking the tail when stressed is a common behavior for snakes worldwide! Some North American non-venomous snakes, like rat snakes, do it to mimic rattlesnakes, but there are also Asian vipers and colubrids that rattle their tails, thousands of miles from any rattlesnake. This means that tail shaking is probably an ancestral behavior for snakes, that rattlesnakes just got really good at.
    3. Snakes are widely considered the most common animals in religion and mythology worldwide. Just about everybody has stories about snakes or art featuring them, even in places snakes don’t actually live, like Ireland and the Arctic Circle!
    4. Snakes live on every continent except Antarctica! Although some far north regions are too cold for snakes to live, and some islands like Ireland and New Zealand don’t have native snakes because they broke off the mainland before snakes could migrate there.
    5. A famous snake from Chinese mythology is Bai Suzhen, or Madame White Snake, a powerful shapeshifting spirit. Unlike a lot of mythical snakes, she’s a purely good character. Her main story focuses on her ill-fated romance with a human man, and she was historically worshipped as a goddess of healing and medicine.
    6. Titanoboa, the largest snake to ever live, lived in South America from about 60 to 55 million years ago. Based on estimates from fossil rib bones and modern snakes, it could grow over 40 feet (12 meters) long!
    7. The cobras you see on ancient Egyptian pharaohs’ headdresses are called uraei (singular uraeus). They’re symbols of protection identified with the goddess Wadjet and appear all over the place in Egyptian art and hieroglyphs. Sometimes they also have wings.
    8. “Spitting cobras” don’t actually spit, and a lot of them aren’t cobras. Venom spitting evolved separately across multiple groups of snakes in Africa and Asia. The way it works is basically like a water gun — there are tiny holes in the front of spitting snakes’ fangs which when they push venom out of their venom glands, force it out in a high-pressure stream, like trying to pour a lot of water through a small straw.
    9. The snake with the longest fangs is the Gaboon viper, a large ambush predator from Africa. Its fangs can grow up to 2 inches (5.1 centimeters) long! Like a lot of snakes with big fangs, the fangs fold back onto the roof of its mouth when not in use. Otherwise, it couldn’t close its mouth!
    10. The holes next to some snakes’ nostrils are called heat pits. These organs sense heat and relay that information to visual areas of the brain, letting the snakes essentially see in infrared! This comes in handy for hunting down warm-blooded prey, especially in dark environments.
    11. Like all reptiles, snakes are ectothermic and get most of their body heat from the environment. This means they’re really efficient about processing food — some snakes in zoos have gone over a year without eating and been perfectly fine!
    12. Most snakes lay eggs, but some give live birth. They don’t do it like mammals, though — snakes, and other live-bearing reptiles are ovoviviparous, which means that each baby still has a separate egg, they just don’t have shells and grow inside the mother, the fully formed baby snakes “hatching” out of her cloaca once they’re done.
    13. Despite the popular myth, baby venomous snakes aren’t more dangerous than adults. Snakes of all ages can control their venom, and adults are more likely to break skin when they bite and have more venom to deliver.
    14. The earliest mythical dragons were pretty much just big snakes. The Greek “drakon” and later Latin “draco”, which we get the word “dragon” from, seem to have been used to both refer to the supernatural snakes that threatened heroes and guarded divine treasures and to regular pythons.
    15. Pythons, a group of constricting snakes found in Asia, Africa, and Australia, get their name from Python, a giant serpentine dragon from Greek mythology. The mythical Python’s most well-known myth is about the god Apollo killing it to claim control over the oracle at Delphi.
    16. The outer hard scales on a snake’s back and belly are called scutes and help protect snakes from drying out and getting poked by sharp objects and give them traction for climbing. They’re made of keratin, like your hair and nails. “Scaleless” snakes still have scales on their skin, but have a genetic mutation that keeps them from growing scutes.
    17. Brown tree snakes, a species originally from Australia that got accidentally introduced to Guam on boats, have a kind of movement no other snake’s been shown to do called “lasso locomotion”. They can wrap their bodies around poles and push themselves up in a circle, letting them climb up smooth poles.
    18. The Amphisbaena is a species of serpent from Greek and Roman mythology and later medieval bestiaries — its name roughly translates to “both way goer” and it looks like what you’d expect: as well as being immune to cold and venomous, it’s got a head on both ends of its body. Its name was later applied to a group of legless lizards with thick tails that look a lot like their heads.
    19. Snakes shed their outer skin every couple of months to once a year depending on their age and species. They rub themselves against rough objects to peel back part of their outer skin then slither out of it, like taking off a sock. The shed skin is mostly transparent, but can still have patterns like on the living snake. Some artists are working on using naturally shed skin to make more ethical alternatives to snakeskin products that don’t require killing the snake.
    20. If you see an ambulance with a symbol of a staff with two snakes coiled around it, they’re getting their mythology wrong. The rod with two snakes coiled around it is the Caduceus, a symbol of the Greek god Hermes and associated with messengers and merchants. What medical providers are looking for is the Rod of Asclepius, a staff with one snake coiled around it and a symbol of medicine.
    21. Sea snakes live in ocean areas around Australia and southeast Asia and rarely wash up on beaches in California. Despite being air-breathing reptiles, they spend nearly their entire lives underwater and even have paddle-shaped tails like eels for swimming!
    22. A snake that’s actively striking can travel as fast as 279 meters per second (615 miles per hour) over the short distance to get their fangs into their prey, with vipers being the fastest. This means they can get half a foot (more than enough for most strikes) in 70 milliseconds, way faster than most mammals can react! (Human reaction time to a visual stimulus is about 200 milliseconds.)
    23. We think of worms as the invertebrates that live in the soil and help decompose matter…but the word used to refer to any serpentine creature, including snakes and snake-like supernatural creatures. You’ll still occasionally see the alternate spelling “wyrm” used to refer to snaky dragons in some fantasy novels.
    24. The word “serpent” for snakes is related to the Greek “herpeton”, the root as “herpetology”, the study of reptiles and amphibians. It refers to animals that creep or crawl on the ground, which was how medieval classifiers sorted reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates. So anyone calling reptiles or bugs “creepy-crawlies” is doing some pretty profound historical exploration!
    25. There are over 3,000 currently recognized species of snake all over the world. Over 200 live in North America.

    Have a great new year, hopefully full of learning and exploration, whether that’s snaky or otherwise!

    To learn more about snakes, check out El the reptile overlord’s classes at Athena’s! Dragonology and Animal Behavior have spots open for spring 2025. Check out El’s courses at Athena’s here:
    https://athenasacademy.com/junior_instructor/el-the-reptile-overlord/

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