20240223-04 -- Do snakes have ears (and how do they hear)

Do snakes have ears? How do they hear?

Snakes do not have ears.^[1]
They do, however, react to both (loud) airborne sounds and ground-based vibrations.^[2]

‘Snakes are able to detect both airborne and groundborne vibrations using their body surface (termed somatic hearing) as well as from their inner ears.’^[3]

C.B. Christensen, et al. ‘Hearing with an atympanic ear: good vibration and poor sound-pressure detection in the royal python, Python regius’, Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 215 (2012), p. 331. ↩︎
C.B. Christensen, et al. ‘Hearing with an atympanic ear: good vibration and poor sound-pressure detection in the royal python, Python regius’, n.p. ↩︎
Bruce A. Young, ‘Snake Bioacoustics: Toward a Richer Understanding of the Behavioral Ecology of Snakes’, The Quarterly Review of Biology 78, issue 3, (2003), pp. 303-325. ↩︎