How Do Sidewinder Snakes Move? The Science of Sidewinding

Sidewinder snakes move by lifting most of their body off the sand and planting just a few sections at a time, which stay still while the rest swings sideways. Two body waves, one side to side and one up and down, make the snake travel diagonally with almost no slip, at a lower energy cost than ordinary slithering.

Published 9 October 2026 · Last reviewed 9 October 2026 · Species profile · How snakes move

How does a sidewinder move?

A sidewinder does not slide its belly across the sand. Instead, it lifts parts of its body clear of the ground, swings them sideways, and sets them down again a little further on. At any moment only a few sections of the body touch the sand, and those sections stay still while they are down. Researchers describe these as regions of static contact: the snake presses on them like feet, while the lifted parts move freely through the air.

Biologist Henry Astley and colleagues showed in 2015 that this complicated-looking motion can be described as two simple waves running down the body at once. One is a horizontal wave, the side-to-side bending you see in any snake. The other is a vertical wave that lifts and lowers the body. The two waves are a quarter of a cycle out of step (a 90° phase difference), and that timing decides which parts are up and which parts are down. The result is a snake that travels diagonally, at an angle to the way its head and tail point, leaving a set of separate, parallel tracks rather than one continuous groove.

Why do sidewinders move sideways?

Because sand is a slippery, shifting surface, and ordinary slithering on it wastes effort. When a snake slithers by lateral undulation, it pushes against bumps, stones and plants along its sides. Loose, smooth sand gives it little to push against, so the body slips. Sidewinding avoids the problem by planting body sections straight down and lifting the rest, so most of the body is not dragging at all.

It also saves energy. In a classic 1992 treadmill study, Stephen Secor, Bruce Jayne and Albert Bennett measured how much oxygen sidewinders used. Their net cost of transport (the energy needed to move one gram of body one kilometre) was significantly lower than that of similar-sized racer snakes (Coluber constrictor) moving by either lateral undulation or concertina locomotion. It was even lower than predicted for lizards of the same size running on legs.

How fast can a sidewinder go?

Faster than you might think for a small snake. In the same 1992 study, the fastest burst recorded from one sidewinder was 3.7 km/h (about 2.3 mph). For stamina, adult snakes kept up with a treadmill moving at 0.5 km/h for anywhere from 33 minutes to more than three hours, and at 0.7 km/h they lasted 9 to 52 minutes.

How do sidewinders climb sand dunes?

Sand slopes defeat most machines, but sidewinders climb them. In a 2014 study in Science, Hamidreza Marvi, Daniel Goldman and colleagues filmed sidewinders on a tilting bed of sand. As the slope got steeper, the snakes increased the length of their body in contact with the sand, spreading their weight so the sand was less likely to give way beneath them. When the team programmed the same trick into a snake robot, which had previously slipped and pitched on sandy slopes, it could climb slopes close to the steepest angle at which the sand stays stable.

How do sidewinders turn?

The two-wave system also explains their agility. Astley's team found that sidewinders use two kinds of turn. In a differential turn, a gentle curve of about 26° per wave cycle, the snake appears to change the size of its side-to-side wave. In a reversal turn, a sharp change of about 89°, it appears to shift the timing of its lifting wave by half a cycle, so it sets off in a new direction. A robot using the same rules turned in the same ways, and the researchers also found a third turn the snakes were never seen to use.

Do sidewinders have special scales?

Yes, at a microscopic level. Most snakes have tiny spikes on their belly scales that point backwards, toward the tail. These help with forward slithering, because the skin grips more easily in one direction than the other. In 2021, Jennifer Rieser, Joseph Mendelson and colleagues scanned the belly skin of 22 viper species with an atomic force microscope. They found that the sidewinder rattlesnake and two unrelated North African sidewinding vipers (Cerastes cerastes and Cerastes vipera) have a similar texture of pits that grips about equally in every direction. Their model showed that this even grip helps sidewinding, while backward-pointing spikes help slithering. Because these snakes are only distantly related, the matching texture appears to have evolved separately in each group, a case of convergent evolution.

Is the sidewinder the only snake that sidewinds?

No. Sidewinding specialists have evolved a few times in sandy deserts, including the American sidewinder and several Old World vipers in Africa and the Middle East. But in a 2020 review, Jessica Tingle gathered reports showing that dozens of other species sidewind at least occasionally, with varying skill, under particular conditions. That makes sidewinding less of an oddity and more of a tool many snakes can reach for. Biologist Bruce Jayne has also argued that sidewinding is one of the clearly distinct modes of snake movement, alongside rectilinear (caterpillar-like) crawling.

Why do snake robots copy sidewinders?

Because the same problems that sidewinders solved (soft ground, slopes and tight turns) are the ones that make robots fail. The 2014 and 2015 studies both used a snake robot as a physical model to test what the animals were doing, and in both cases borrowing the snake's strategy made the robot better.

Want more? Read about the other ways snakes get around on our snake movement page, compare desert snakes with other species on our species page and habitats guide, or learn to tell harmless snakes from venomous ones with the ID guide. You might also like our article on the paradise flying snake, another snake with a surprising way of moving. Snake fans can keep an eye on the SnakeWise shop, which is coming soon.