Can snakes hear? - Reptilenesia

Anatomy of the human ear

Most tetrapods have a three-part ear (outer, middle, and inner) that is useful for detecting airborne sounds. The boundary between the outer and middle ear is called the tympanic membrane or "ear drum", and its function is to convert airborne sounds from the outer ear into fluid-borne ones in the inner ear¹, by way of one or more middle ear bones. Sounds are ultimately converted by auditory hair cells called stereocilia into nerve impulses, which travel to and are interpreted by the brain. At many stages along the way, the sounds are amplified by the vibrations they produce in the different parts of the ear, including the middle ear bones (more on these in a minute). It's been suggested that this three-part system evolved (possibly multiple times) around the beginning of the Triassic Period, in concert with the evolution of sound production in insects, the probable prey of many early amniotes. Many modern animals, such as songbirds, bats, dolphins, humans, frogs, and crocodilians, have very sensitive hearing that can detect extremely quiet airborne signals in spite of the presence of other competing noises.

Micro-CT scan of a ball python's skull and ear. Red: mandible; dark blue: quadrate; green: columella; purple/light blue: inner ear chambers From Christensen et al. 2012 Click here for an interactive 3-D model.

You're probably familiar with the three bones of the middle ear in mammals, the malleus, incus, and stapes (also known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup). Snakes and other reptiles have only a single middle ear bone, which is usually called the columella, although it is homologous with the mammalian stapes. The malleus and the incus evolved from the articular and quadrate bones in the lower jaw of early mammal-like reptiles, leaving modern mammals with a single lower jaw bone, the dentary. Modern reptiles still have three bones in their lower jaws, where they play a role in detecting vibrations, particularly those propagating through the ground. Most modern lizard ears are essentially like those of modern mammals, with a small external ear leading to a large ear drum close to the body's surface, which passes sound from the air (or the jawbones) to the columella and thence to the inner ear. In contrast, snakes lack all traces of an outer ear as well as an ear drum. Instead, a snake's columella is in direct contact with, and picks up vibrations from, its quadrate bone (the dark blue bone in the diagram above). You might suspect that this arrangement would only be useful for detecting ground-borne vibrations, and you'd be partially right: snakes are exquisitely sensitive to ground-borne vibrations. But, they can also detect airborne sounds.²

Diagram of the ear of a watersnake (Nerodia) Modified from Wever 1978

Both older and several more recent experiments suggest that snakes can hear the vibrations produced by airborne sounds. Physiological data suggest that they are able to detect certain airborne frequencies directly using the inner ear, although the specific bioacoustic mechanisms remain poorly known. Instead, most airborne sounds are probably detected in using "somatic hearing". This happens when airborne sound waves strike a snake's body  and some of their energy is transferred to its bones, tissues, and organs, particularly the head and lung. The snake's vibration-sensitive hearing system can then pick up on and translate the vibrations from the rest of its body into fluid-borne vibrations and, ultimately, nerve impulses. So a snake probably can't hear, say, most music³ or human speech directly, but it can hear the sound of its own body vibrating in response to those sounds. So, instead of being deaf, snakes essentially have two auditory systems that are at least peripherally distinct. Whether signals from these two systems are integrated into a single neural pathway, as is the case for the eye and the pit organ, or whether they serve different functions, remains to be studied and determined.

The length and arrangement of the auditory hairs in the inner ears of snakes appears to be fairly uniform across species, at least relative to the variation seen in lizards, which can have very different auditory hair anatomy among families and often even among closely-related species. Snakes mostly have simple, tuatara-like papillae, which suggests that they have secondarily lost a more complex type of auditory organ. This might be due to the aquatic or burrowing lifestyle of their ancestors and/or to specializations of their lower jaws in response to their unusual eating habits. There is some variation in inner ear anatomy (and presumably in hearing capacity) among snakes: burrowing snakes have the longest papillae, arboreal snakes the shortest, and terrestrial snakes have papillae of intermediate length. Many mammals have over 10,000 auditory hair cells, whereas most snakes have only about 250 (although acrochordids have nearly 1,500). Supporting cells of unclear function are relatively more numerous in snakes and these cells have ultrastructural features that suggest that they are more specialized than those of other reptiles.

The louder and lower frequency airborne sounds are, the more easily a snake can detect them. This isn't entirely unlike our own hearing—although we do hear high-pitched airborne sounds directly more easily than snakes do, we also rely on amplification provided by our ear drums, inner ear hairs, and other parts of our bodies. Studies have shown that snakes can hear sounds in the 80-600 Hz range optimally, with some species hearing sounds up to 1000 Hz (for comparison, the range of human hearing is from 20-20,000 Hz). This means that a snake could hear middle C on a piano, as well as about one octave above and two below, but neither the lowest key (which is 27.5 Hz) nor the highest (which is 4186 Hz). The average human voice is around 250 Hz, which means that snakes can hear us talking as well. Of course, there is likely a lot of variation among snake species, and the hearing of most species has not been examined, so these are generalizations.