How Does a Snake Grow?

Video Transcript

"How does a snake grow? Well that's a good question. Snakes grow in a kind of different way than we do. People shed skin every day all day as they grow and change and move around. Snake scales are a little different they are more like an armor coating on the outside they don't allow for such free growth so what actually happens is they shed their skin like right down here we have shed skin from a baby corn snake, well not really too much of a baby any more. What they do is they rub their head against something, here's the head over here. They rub their head to split their skin and then slowly roll it off of them kind of like taking off a sock from the top down until this is actually inside out. When it comes off of them and it is inside out. Then you can actually see all the little individual scales on the top and you can see all of the belly scales on the bottom and they do this depending on the size of the snake. A baby snake might shed every week to an adult snake that might shed once a year so it really varies as to how often they're going to shed their skin because it depends on how much they are growing. Obviously an adult snake grows a lot less than a baby snake so they are going to shed a lot less but they do need to shed every once in a while to revitalize their scales, repair any damage that may have occurred and continue on with their healthy life."