Can Snakes Hear? How Snakes Sense Sound and Vibration

Do snakes have ears?

Look at the side of a snake’s head and you will see no ear opening at all. Lizards, by contrast, usually have a visible eardrum behind the eye. Snakes lost the outer and middle ear structures during their evolution, possibly because their ancestors burrowed, where an open ear would fill with soil.

What snakes kept is the inner ear, the fluid-filled organ that detects sound and also helps with balance. A single small bone, the stapes (also called the columella), connects the inner ear to the quadrate bone. The quadrate is the hinge between the skull and the lower jaw. So in a snake, the jaw itself acts as part of the hearing system.

How do snakes hear?

Snakes detect sound in two main ways.

Through the ground. When a snake rests its lower jaw on the ground, vibrations pass from the soil into the jaw, through the quadrate and stapes to the inner ear. This system is remarkably sensitive; it can detect extremely small vibrations. Because the two halves of a snake’s lower jaw move independently, a snake with its chin on the ground may even get some sense of the direction a vibration comes from.

Through the air. Snakes can also pick up airborne sound. Sound waves make the skull and body vibrate slightly, and those vibrations reach the inner ear. A study of ball pythons found they responded to both vibration and airborne sound, and were most sensitive at low frequencies of roughly 80–160 Hz. The snake’s air-filled lung may also help by vibrating in response to sound.

Snakes also have vibration-sensitive receptors in the skin of the belly, which pass signals to the spinal cord. These help a snake feel the ground it moves over and anything moving near it.

What can snakes hear?

Snakes hear a narrow band of low frequencies, roughly 50–1,000 Hz, with the best sensitivity at the low end. People hear about 20–20,000 Hz. This means snakes are probably deaf to high-pitched sounds such as most birdsong, whistles and the higher parts of speech and music, but they can sense deep rumbles, thuds and the low frequencies in a voice.

In 2023, researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia played airborne sounds below 450 Hz to 19 species of snakes in a soundproof room, with the floor isolated from vibration. Many snakes reacted. Some, such as taipans and brown snakes, tended to move away from the sound, while woma pythons were more likely to move toward it. The study showed that snakes do detect airborne sound and that different species respond differently.

Do snake charmers’ cobras hear the music?

Not in the way the audience does. A snake charmer’s flute, the pungi, plays mostly higher notes that a cobra barely hears. The cobra reacts instead to the swaying movement of the flute and the charmer, which it treats as a threat. It rears up and spreads its hood, then sways to keep the “threat” in view. Learn more about the display in why do cobras spread their hoods?

Snake charming with wild-caught cobras is now illegal in India, and snake charmers often removed fangs or venom glands or kept the snakes in poor conditions, so it is not a practice to support.

Why hearing matters to snakes

For a snake, hearing is mostly an early-warning system. Footsteps and the rumble of large animals tell it when to freeze or slip away, which is why snakes usually move off before people even notice them. Some snakes may also use low-frequency sounds and vibrations from prey, such as the rustling of rodents.

Hearing works alongside a snake’s other senses. Smell, through the flicking tongue and the Jacobson’s organ, is the most important; see why do snakes flick their tongues? Pit vipers, pythons and boas can also sense heat; see how do pit vipers sense heat?

Examples: king cobras and garter snakes

The king cobra of Asia makes one of the deepest sounds of any snake, a growl with a dominant frequency near 600 Hz. That falls within the range snakes can hear, so other king cobras and some of its snake prey may be able to detect it, although the growl is mainly aimed at predators such as mammals.

The common garter snake of North America relies mainly on smell and sight to find frogs, fish and worms, but like other snakes it is quick to react to vibrations. A garter snake basking near a path will often slide away at the sound of approaching footsteps.

Myths about snake hearing

“Snakes are deaf.” This old belief appears in ancient texts and was common until the mid-20th century. Experiments have since shown that snakes hear low frequencies and are very sensitive to vibration.

“Snakes hear with their tongues.” The tongue is a smelling organ, not a hearing one. It collects scent particles for the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of the mouth.

“Stamping makes snakes attack.” Heavy footsteps usually make snakes move away. Walking normally on paths and watching where you step is the best way to avoid surprising one.