Some snakes appear to reply in a different way to their very own scent when it has been altered, which hints that they’ve some type of self-recognition.

A handful of animals, together with roosters, horses and cleaner fish, have proven indicators of self-awareness in what is named the mirror take a look at. This includes placing paint on an space of their physique that they will’t see with no mirror, equivalent to their brow. If the animal touches the mark when trying within the mirror, it means that they’re conscious that the reflection is of themselves, and never a picture of one other particular person.

“However snakes and most reptiles primarily work together with their world via scent,” says Noam Miller at Wilfrid Laurier College in Canada. So he and his colleagues challenged them to an alternate, smell-based model of the mirror take a look at.

The crew members collected the scents of 36 japanese garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis) and 18 ball pythons (Python regius) by wiping cotton pads alongside their pores and skin.

They then offered every snake with 5 scents: their very own, their very own with a little bit of olive oil added, simply olive oil, certainly one of one other snake of the identical species and certainly one of one other snake with a little bit of olive oil.

The garter snakes carried out extra lengthy tongue flicks in response to their very own modified scent in contrast with the remainder of the scents.

“They solely do lengthy tongue flicks once they’re curious about or investigating one thing,” says Miller, which means that the garter snakes can recognise when one thing about themselves doesn’t scent fairly proper. “They might be considering: ‘Oh, that is bizarre, I shouldn’t scent like this.’”

Ball pythons, alternatively, responded in the identical technique to all of the scents. Garter snakes are rather more social than ball pythons, says Miller, so it could be that social species usually tend to have self-recognition.

The findings are the primary proof of potential self-recognition in snakes, says Miller. “There’s this assumption that snakes, and practically all reptiles, are these sluggish, instinctive, non-cognitive animals, and that’s positively not true.”

Nevertheless, Johannes Brandl on the College of Salzburg in Austria questions whether or not this must be interpreted as self-recognition. “This interpretation solely turns into believable if a correlation with social behaviour might be established,” he says. In any other case, it may very well be argued that some snake species are merely extra inclined to work together with the experiment.