Briefing Chat: Meet the snakes that cartwheel away from trouble

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1:14hi listeners benjamin here welcome to the friday show the briefing chat where we talk about a couple of stories we've read about in the nature briefing joining me this week is marron huntsberger marron hi hello happy friday listen why don't you go first this week now i'll let listeners into a little secret. Often when we start this show, we don't know what the other person's going to talk about. This week, I did because I sent you a message yesterday that just said, what the hell? And it's a story about snakes. It is. It's a story about snakes. But I'm going to start by asking you, Ben, have you ever wished that animals had wheels?

1:45Oh, absolutely. All the time. Can you imagine how helpful that would be in terms of getting around? Well, these snakes have the solution for you because these snakes exhibit a completely unique form of rolling locomotion, which is, as you might imagine, quite rare in the animal kingdom. Yeah, I've seen a video of this, which is what blew my mind when I saw it. Tell listeners what these snakes actually do. It's fantastic. Well, the researchers and many of the people covering this, including myself, because I made a TikTok video about it, you can watch it on all of our social media channels. Just a quick plug there.

2:15They're doing cartwheels. The snakes are doing cartwheels, Ben. Well, we can argue about whether it's a cartwheel or not in a minute. Maybe tell me about the snake itself first. Exactly. Given that snakes have no hands or legs, cartwheel might not be quite the best way to describe this motion. But these are dwarf reed snakes, which is a tiny snake. They average between 11 and 27 centimeters. So they're quite little. They're totally harmless. They have no venom. They mostly are insectivorous. So they eat insects on the forest floor. But lots of things want to eat them. So they have no way to defend themselves, really.

2:47They have no venom and they're big enough to bite anything. So the way that they take care of themselves is by getting away in a very flamboyant manner. So the way that this was discovered, it was a field research team out in the forest in Malaysia came across this snake that did a really interesting flipping motion when disturbed. So if you give the snake a little tap on the tail, it'll do a big curving circular flip in the air to get away. And the researchers actually measured that this motion does get them away faster than just your regular old slither. And also, it might serve to be confusing to predators.

3:22It might make them look bigger, maybe look more threatening, or maybe harder to catch by, you know, getting them out of a predator's claws. So something bad happens and the snake says, let's roll. Let's flip out of here, man. Literally. And that's the thing, right? Because a cartwheel, you suggest that maybe the head's biting onto the tail and it's literally rolling along. But this isn't the case here. Exactly. It's not quite a true hoop snake, right? It doesn't roll itself into a full circle. It will roll its body along the ground such that its head comes up off the ground and then using a really remarkable, complex and energy intensive motion, flip its tail off the ground, like sort of almost springing itself off like a pogo stick.

4:04And then its tail whips above its head and its head and neck area, if we want to call it that. I guess snake is mostly neck. Makes a little S shape so that its tail can come around in a circle and back down on the ground to start the motion again. Obviously, difficult to describe verbally, but I recommend that viewers check out the footage because it's an amazing motion to watch in action. And even though when viewed at regular speed, because it's quite fast, looks a bit chaotic, sort of like they're just flailing all over the place. It's a cyclical, repetitive motion that happens in the same way every time.

4:40And they sort of flip from side to side. So from belly to back as they go through the different cycles of circular cartwheeling away. And it is quick, as you say. And that's what Threema, right? It is moving. Now, often these things are kind of a weird N equals one, right? as you say, no one had ever seen a rolling snake before. Is it just an animal oddity, or do researchers expect to find more kind of weird stuff like this out there? It's a good question. I think that is a question that is posed by this research. So the behavior was first observed in 2019 by, as I mentioned, a field biology team in Malaysia.

5:12That result was published in 2023, just as a one-off observation that this happened. That triggered this question of, okay, how does this happen and what's going on? And this team at Toho University just published that paper in Current Biology a week ago. And that's where we got this footage from where they brought the snakes back into the lab. It's only happening in this one genus of snake. It's called Pseudorhabdian. And then other related reed snakes that are native to this same area were also tested and did not exhibit this behavior. So it's a big question about why this behavior evolved in this snake and not others.

5:47What's special about them that might make them able to do this, lots of interesting questions arise. Indeed. And what did the researchers say about finding this out? Well, it's my favorite quote from the paper, Ben, is that a striking example of the way that an animal's morphology constrains locomotive strategies is the absence of wheels in the animal kingdom. And the researchers say that this acrobatic behavior in this snake illustrates how behavioral innovation can circumvent these constraints. So, hey, don't have wheels? Try doing a flip. Sure. And actually, I've just done a perfect backflip sitting here, Maren, haven't I?

6:20They'll never know. Anyway, right. Let's move on to our second story this week. And it's a story that I read about in science based on a paper in PNAS. And it's about what could be the oldest fossilized red blood cells ever recorded, right? From the remains of 115 million year old dinosaur. We could be talking about dinosaur blood here. Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park is obviously where one goes to think about this. The researchers, I think have distanced themselves from that idea of being able to extract DNA from this kind of thing. But things like this are very, very rare, right? Things that aren't bone don't fossilize very well or very often.

6:57Absolutely. How is this preserved? Oh, there is a story to that and we will get to it. And I have to say, it's not the first time that researchers have said that they found red blood cell structures in fossils. Not everyone's been convinced about these and we'll get to why that might be the case here as well later on. But this study looks at bone from the dinosaur Aratosaurus musinacianale. Now, this name reflects that it survived a catastrophic fire that engulfed the National Museum of Brazil back in 2018. I certainly remember it. We talked about it, I think, on the show. And this is a survivor, but it wasn't necessarily a survivor 115 million years ago.

7:33Hence its fossilization. Hence its fossilization. So it died and sank into this kind of watery grave, but was overgrown by this microbial mat that kind of encased it, which ultimately preserved it, which is how we have this fossil. Natural mummification. Indeed. So fast forward 115 million years then, researchers were studying it, looking at very thin segments. and nestled inside these sort of channels, I suppose, that once carried blood vessels through the bone. They found hints of these fossilized cells, round structures with sunken centers. So like an impression of a red blood cell. Yeah, absolutely.

8:16And they did a bunch of tests. And these tests revealed the presence of heme, which is, of course, the iron-containing compound that blood cells use to transport oxygen. and they also found evidence of degraded heme which they say was important because it suggests that this molecule degraded over time which is what you would expect in a really old dinosaur fossil they did loads of other tests as well i think with stuff like this ruling out contamination is a key thing and in particular chlorophyll which is a molecule very similar to heme could potentially be misidentified and the microbial mat that sort of encased this dinosaur had a lot of chlorophyll in it.

8:56And so the researchers did a lot of testing here, and they revealed that outside the bone was dominated by chlorophyll compounds, whereas inside the bone was dominated by heme-derived molecules, as their evidence suggests, which they put forward is not contamination, right? That these could be red blood cells. Okay, so the structures they're observing inside the bone could be red blood cells. But as we mentioned, incredibly fragile piece of organic material. How was it preserved for this long? Well, yeah, that's a fair question. And in this work, the authors used, you know, x-ray tools, electron microscopy, and showed that these cell-like structures, these structures that could be red blood cells, were associated with this manganese compound called Hausmanite, which seems to have formed in and around the red blood cells and may have sort of helped stabilize them and help preserve them over all this time.

9:50But I have to say, not everyone is convinced that these are red blood cells. Okay, so what is giving people cause for doubt? Well, there's been some pushback with one researcher, for instance, saying that these potential red blood cells are larger than the red blood cells found in birds and crocodiles, which are non-avian dinosaurs' closest relatives. But there could be a reason for that. Maybe the fossilization process caused them to swell up. But also the red blood cells of birds and crocodiles contain a nucleus. So they're kind of a convex shape, whereas the things that the researchers in this case think are red blood cells are concave.

10:27Oh, like ours. Yeah, a little bit like ours. And ours don't have a nucleus. So they're thinking, hey, if they're a different shape, does that mean that they're really a red blood cell? Because that red blood cell might have had a nucleus. Yeah. So, I mean, it's disagreement, right? And that is, of course, science. But in this instance, the researchers behind this work stand by it, of course. They say they've gathered multiple lines of evidence, but only time will tell. But I think what this research does show is that there are more secrets to be found in fossils. Now, this is a fairly nondescript fossil, it has to be said.

10:56And there are obviously countless nondescript dinosaur bones tucked away in museums. So who knows what secrets they might have. And also there's loads of tools, as have been described in this work, that can help sort of peer inside and maybe give more of an idea of what these animals were like other than just the bones that they have. Let's go digging through those museum archive drawers and take apart the dinosaur bones looking for echoes of ancient blood. Where do we go from there? I think that is the right place to leave. Actually, there's one thing I do want to add. Obviously, we're all massive nerds here at The Nature Podcast.

11:28Speak for yourself, Ben. Hey. And there is a really lovely article over at nature.com slash news about the influence that Patrick Stewart had on various scientists' careers. So we all love The Next Generation. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. It's well worth a read. And I'll also put links on the stories we've talked about today and where you can sign up for the nature briefing to get more of them delivered directly to your inbox. But all I say is, number one, Maren Hunsberger, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Ben, and live long and prosper.

12:12like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's go.gle slash workspace with Gemini. In 2011, a woman's body was found in a California vineyard. This is one of those types of murder investigations that you come across maybe once, maybe never. It appeared the killer tried to make the victim unidentifiable. Much more extreme than any other case I'd ever worked on.

12:50It haunted me. For over a decade, she was a Jane Doe. Then she finally had a name. But learning her identity is when the real mystery began. The killer knows who you are, but you don't know who the killer is. So be careful. because that's not a one and done. I'm Olivia LaVoice, and this is Ada. All episodes available now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.