Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World
Stephen S. Hall
Grand Central Books
Copyright 2025 by the author

Snakes.

Love ’em or hate ’em, there’s little in-between.

Hall, a professional science writer, would probably fall into the “love ’em” category. Here, he introduces us to some of the researchers studying them, presents in an easy-to-follow manner some of their recent findings, and comments on our strange relationship with the creatures over the millennia.

After an introduction that covers the history of herpetology (the study of snakes), each chapter looks at one area of study. Snake venom, how it works, and the difficulty in coming up with a “universal anti-venom”…. How some snakes can eat only once every several months, and how their bodies undergo extremely rapid changes as they start to digest those intermittent feasts…. Their different ways of sensing the environment, and how we can’t possibly imagine what their “world view” is….. Snake mating, and the “evolutionary war” playing out on the battlefield of genitalia….. In the field with a “snake hunter”, trying to find invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades.… In between the chapters are lengthy “sidebars” that look at our historical and cultural association with snakes.

Hall also – in passing – looks at the many biases that have delayed the serious study of this class of reptiles. Aside from the significant fraction of people who view snakes as “icky”, most of them are furtive creatures who don’t come out in the open where they can be observed. And those that do are the sort that live in places like deserts and jungles that are hard to get to. And don’t forget the venom. Given that, it’s easy to see why they’ve rarely been seen as worthy of study. A good number of the researchers Hall meets with actually got into the field because they were basically told “No one is studying snakes. Why not have a go at them?”

There are even stupider biases. It took a group of women scientists to make an interesting discovery about the reproductive anatomy of female snakes because male scientists (evidently) never even thought to look there.

There aren’t any photos (even though Hall frequently mentions the beautiful colors and scale patterns on the snakes). I thought that was a point against the book, but it’s more about the people actually studying them – and what they are finding – than the snakes themselves. And you can easily find picture books if you want.