Question: Do snakes ever blink? We stared at the snake in the Melbourne Museum for ages – it didn’t blink once. It didn’t move either, but the staff at the museum assured us it was alive.
Answer: I’m afraid you picked the wrong animal to have a staring competition with.
A Yellow-faced Whip Snake (Demansia psammophis) shedding its skin.
Photographer: Peter Robertson / Source: Museum Victoria
Snakes have no eyelids. Each eye is covered with a single clear eye scale. These eye scales protect the eyes from injury and prevent the eyes from drying out.
Snakes are therefore unable to close their eyes – they can’t blink and they must sleep with their eyes open. The snake you observed at the Melbourne Museum may therefore have been asleep.
A snake’s eye scales are part of its skin. This means that when a snake sheds its skin, it must also shed its eye scales. Prior to shedding, a snake’s skin becomes dull and the eye scales become cloudy or opaque. This is because snakes secrete a milky fluid between the old skin and the new skin before they shed.
Mitchell's Short-tailed Snake (Suta nigriceps) shedding its skin.
Photographer: Peter Robertson / Source: Museum Victoria
When they’re ready to shed, snakes rub their snouts against something until their old skin splits. They then work to peel the skin back from their lips to their tails, turning it inside out like a stocking as they do so. Snakes tend to shed their entire skin in one piece and the eye scales are very obvious on a shed skin.
The shed skin of a Death Adder showing the eye scales.
Photographer: Alan Henderson / Source: Minibeast Wildlife