How Do Snakes Sense Movement?

Video Transcript

"How do snakes sense movement? Well it's actually quite complicated. It is a delicate mixture of three senses. The sense of touch, the sense of smell and also a sense that we don't have but snakes do which is the ability to sense heat. So what they do is they sense vibrations in the ground so if you are walking past a snake or if a large animal is moving past a snake he can sense that in the leaf litter and dirt on the ground, combine that with his heightened ability to smell using his tongue and Jacobson's Organ and he uses that to catch scents off the air and that will help him to position where things are as well and the biggest tool in his repertoire for sensing movement is going to be his ability to sense heat. Snakes have the innate ability to off the front of their heads to sense heat movement and they use that to judge distance and direction of potential prey and predators. So by simply moving the heat around you can actually see the snake follow the heat source. That is their number one tool for sensing movement, nothing comes before that."