Cartwheeling snake: tiny Borneo reed snake rolls away from danger at 13 km/h

A tiny snake from the rainforests of Borneo escapes danger by turning itself into a wheel: it flips head over tail and cartwheels away at up to 3.7 metres a second (about 13 km/h), filmed in detail for the first time in a study published on 19 October 2026 in the journal Current Biology.

The animal is a dwarf reed snake, Pseudorabdion saravacense, just 11 to 28 centimetres long, about the length of a pencil, Science News reported.

How the cartwheeling snake works

The team, led by ecologist Yosuke Kojima of Toho University in Japan, collected snakes in Kubah National Park in Sarawak, Malaysia, and filmed them on a 2.2-metre track. Each roll goes like this:

1. The snake curls into a C shape, head raised and pointing the way it wants to go.
2. It whips its tail back and briefly leaves the ground.
3. The tail swings forward and down, past the head.
4. The tail lands beside the head and the next roll begins.

The striking part is the head: it stays fairly steady while the body spins around it, much as flying snakes keep their heads still when they launch into the air. Speeds ranged from 1.7 to 3.7 m/s, roughly 6 to 13 km/h.

Why it is surprising

Snakes are long and flexible, which makes rolling hard. "I find it especially amazing that an elongate animal like a snake can manage to roll," said Jessica Tingle, a Brown University biologist who was not part of the study. "What a cool snake behavior."

Not all small snakes can do it. Six Calamaria reed snakes tested for comparison never cartwheeled. The team also looked at single specimens of two related species, P. collaris and P. longiceps; a 2023 paper in Biotropica had captured the first still photos of P. longiceps cartwheeling, after a colleague in Sarawak reported seeing the behaviour in 2019.

Kojima says the snakes are usually hard to find because they hide under fallen leaves, and that people can catch them. Rolling is their way of getting out of sight fast when something disturbs them.

Is it dangerous?

No. These are small, secretive snakes of Borneo's forest floor, a long way from Pakistan. If you are worried about snakes closer to home, our report on 1,060 snake bites logged by Rescue 1122 in Punjab this year covers what to do after a bite.

The full study, "Locomotor kinematics and head stabilization in rolling snakes", is in Current Biology, and Science News has posted the slow-motion video.