– Gordon M. Burghardt, PhD, Board of Directors, ASP
Three recent books have added to our knowledge and appreciation of snakes. The most general, inexpensive, and accessible is Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate our World, by Stephen S. Hall (2025, Grand Central Publishing, New York). Comprised of eight chapters and a historical epilogue, Hall brings much modern research on multiple aspects of snake biology and behavior to life through a mix of scientific rigor, storytelling, myths, and intimate portraits of the work of some leading scientists. He provides the latest details on snake sex and reproduction, venom, their sensory worlds, and how they can digest gigantic prey, often more than half their body weight. Advances in field methods such as tracking individuals in the field and using trail cams at den sites are revealing that snakes are far more social than older herpetologists could have imagined. Even how snakes move turns out to involve unimagined complications, as in sidewinding and concertina movements. The difficulties of trying to manage captive snakes gone wild, like Burmese Pythons in Florida, are illustrated through the daily life of the Python Queen of Florida. The book is a successful and sympathetic effort to bring the lives of serpents and those who study them to the fore.
Two other edited books from 2023 provide research-rich overviews of select aspects of snake research around the world. Somewhat technical in places, both books provide deep insights into the private lives of snakes, often with excellent color photographs along with graphs and tables. The first is Snakes: Morphology, Function, and Ecology, edited by David Penning (Nova Science Publishers, New York). This book has 14 review chapters covering many topics, including: the evolution of head shape and dentition and relation to capturing prey, constriction, foraging, drinking, aquatic adaptations, antipredator behavior, stress, and issues of venom and dealing with venomous species along with human-snake interactions and why people either love or fear snakes.
The other book is Islands and Snakes (Volume 2): Diversity and Conservation, edited by Harvey B. Lillywhite and Marcio Martins (Oxford University Press, New York). Containing 15 chapters, the book covers the ecology, behavior, and conservation of snakes from islands around the world, including those off New Guinea, Japan, Brazil, Florida, India, Mexico, as well as the Galapagos archipelago situated almost 1000 km off of Ecuador in South America. These are all oceanic islands but there are two chapters on islands in freshwater lakes in Macedonia and Lake Michigan in the United States. The latter focuses on the Common Gartersnake, with which most readers will be familiar. The book covers a wide range of species and how they have adapted in size, appearance, and behavior to island life. The book is an excellent introduction to how snake researchers study their animals and test hypotheses, rather than providing authoritative reviews of existing work as excellently done in the Penning volume. All three books are recommended to any who want to learn the latest on our serpentine brethren.
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