By Susan Milius
Gary Gerald studies animal movement, so when two female brown snakes in the lab had babies, he wanted to see them in motion. He watched them crawling on a solid surface, then moved the youngsters to water in a modified gutter. But the system didn’t work as planned for the newborn snakes.
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“I would pick the little guys up and drop them right in the water, and right when I dropped them, they flipped upside down. They stayed motionless. Their bodies were rigid so if you touched one part, they’d spin like if you touch a stick floating on the water,” says Gerald. He concluded that this was a new example of an animal feigning death.