Nature’s “Daily Briefing” had this: Dwarf reed snakes in Borneo escape by rolling: the back half of the body curls into a hoop and rolls along the ground like a wheel, while the head stays up and pointed where the snake is going.

Yosuke Kojima and his colleagues filmed thirteen dwarf reed snakes in the lab in 2019 and 2022, and six ordinary reed snakes for comparison. Every dwarf reed snake rolled; none of the others did. Rolling is fast: a peak of about 2.3 meters a second on average, four times their speed when slithering. The snakes usually ended a run by diving under something nearby.

What interested the authors is the head. A rolling body ought to take the head round with it, and a snake that cannot see where it is going cannot steer. These keep the head steady while the rest of the body cartwheels: the tail pushes off, the body arches over in an S, and the arch swings down past the head to start the next roll.

The paper: Kojima, Fukuyama, Hossman, Kaliang and Nishikawa, “Locomotor kinematics and head stabilization in rolling snakes“, Current Biology 36, R1061–R1063 (19 October 2026).