In this episode of The Naturalist Online! It has long been thought that snakes can't hear, they are deaf, because they lack ears. They can however only feel vibrations through the ground. This has been told to us a lot in books, on websites and in documentaries, including by the magnificent, irreplaceable Steve Irwin. But what if I told you that might not be the case? And snakes can actually hear everything going on around them.
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Learn more:
Hearing with an atympanic ear: http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215...
Snake Bioacoustics: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi...
Auditory Localization of Ground-Borne Vibrations in Snakes: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
Hearing in Rattlesnakes: https://insights.ovid.com/comparative...
*If you are having trouble viewing these papers I recommend using http://sci-hub.tw