Do snakes want their legs back? That was the question Allen Pan, a YouTuber who specialises in making strange inventions, set out recently to answer.
Snakes, the slithering danger noodles of the animal kingdom, once had legs like their limbed relatives, lizards. It’s expected that snakes walked the Earth about 150 million years ago instead of slithering along it.
But legs were evolved out, despite some snakes still having remnants of them. Actually, it’s speculated that snakes have two penises to mimic their leg buds, so it’s an interesting bit of evolution, to say the least.
But do snakes want to walk on legs? Well, Pan set out to solve this mystery.
“When any other animal has deformed legs, humanity comes together to spit in god’s face and we build that animal awesome new cyborg legs,” Pan said in his YouTube video.
“But nobody loves snakes enough to build them robot legs. Nobody except for me.”
Pan’s first prototype involved two pressure sleeves and spider-like robotic legs, but obviously, it would be cruel to have put this on a snake. This was scrapped.
The second design was much better thought-out, with walking movements based on lizards from a local pet store. This time, instead of using pressure sleeves, the second prototype involved a long tube that the snake could slither into.
Obviously, Pan couldn’t just kidnap a snake for this project, so he took the prototype to a professional snake guy to make sure that he “doesn’t hurt the snakes, and that the snakes don’t hurt me”.
It’s a wide tube, so a snake could easily get out if it wanted to. If a snake didn’t want to get in, as you can see in the video, then it wouldn’t be forced.
Also, an unwilling snake would form a defensive “S” shape, which would mean that it very much doesn’t want to be a part of this experiment. The way that Pan puts it: “only happy snakes will be able to use the legs”.
Eventually, a snake slithered its way entirely through the tube, and Pan turned the legs on. Unfortunately, there was no way that the snake could control the legs itself, so the prototype was controlled wirelessly by Pan.
During the test, the snake stayed willingly inside the machine, sticking its head out the end and looking around curiously, not appearing threatened or anxious about the situation. Actually, it was quite cute.
“And now you can walk your snake, just like god never wanted you to,” Pan added.
What does this experiment teach us about snakes? Probably not a lot.
Snakes seem to be going quite well without their legs, but this video gives us an interesting look into what they’d be like with legs. You know what else they’d be like with legs? Lizards.
Is this prosthetic a conversion for a snake to turn it into a lizard? Perhaps, but I think it’s just a goofy experiment.
Very cool, we love to see a mecha-snake.