Do snakes have ears; how do they hear

Do snakes have ears? How do they hear?

‘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]


  1. 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. ↩︎

  2. 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. ↩︎

  3. 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. ↩︎