Caught right-handed: Mystery of coiling snake embryos explained

An international team led by Canadian researchers has solved why snake embryos form a curious spiral. This ability to coil in the embryo is why snakes are able to hatch with the longest body of all vertebrate animals. The study, published today in the journal Current Biology, reports that snake embryos coil into a right-handed spiral as their long body grows while being tethered by the gut. The team observed that for the first few weeks of the eggs being laid, snake embryos seem only to coil dextrally, or right-handed, from head to tail. To grow a long body, snake embryos accelerate the body growth, but the gut cannot catch up with it, so they detach the slow-growing gut, which is now tethering the lengthening body. The body buckles and twists into coiling. The study is based on examination of photos of snake embryos in the literature and in databases of museum collections. More an 900 embryos from 39 snake and other limbless squamate species were assessed.

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