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Coiled Grass Snake Models Had Higher Estimated Daily Survival on a Gravel Road

Grass snake coiled among dry reeds in Hungary
Research · Behaviour

Coiled plasticine models of grass snakes (Natrix natrix) had higher estimated daily survival than uncoiled models on a gravel road in a field experiment at Kis-Balaton in Hungary. The study, published on 19 August 2026, tested whether body posture changed how often visually hunting predators attacked stationary snake models.

The researchers placed 240 models in four postures along a gravel road and an abandoned railway. Predators damaged 21 models, or 8.8% of the total. Birds accounted for 16 of the attacks and mammals for five. Across the experiment as a whole, however, the analysis did not show a clear difference in attack frequency among the four model types or simply between coiled and uncoiled models.

The clearest difference appeared on the gravel road. There, the coiled models representing basking or death-feigning postures had an estimated daily survival of 99.9%, compared with 99.1% for the uncoiled postures. Here, estimated daily survival is the modelled probability that a plasticine model remained unattacked from one day to the next; it is not a measured survival probability for living snakes. The same advantage was not found on the abandoned railway, showing that any benefit of posture depended on the conditions in which the models were placed.

The authors stress that plasticine models cannot reproduce movement, smell, body temperature or the full sequence of death-feigning behaviour shown by a living snake. The experiment therefore does not demonstrate how effective death feigning is in real grass snakes. Instead, it isolates how predators responded to static body posture and colour pattern, suggesting that a coiled posture may reduce attack risk under some conditions.

Sources and image credit

  1. Gedai, Z., Szép, D., & Purger, J. J. (2026). The Impact of Death Feigning Behaviour on the Survival of Grass Snake (Natrix natrix): A Study with Plasticine Models. Biology, 15(16), 1432.Open-access peer-reviewed primary study published 19 August 2026. A field experiment at Kis-Balaton used 240 stationary plasticine grass snake models in four postures. Overall attack frequency did not differ significantly among postures, but coiled models had higher estimated daily survival than uncoiled models on the gravel-road transect. The authors stress that static models cannot measure the overall effectiveness of dynamic death feigning.

Image: Grass snake photographed in reedbeds on the Hungarian side of Fertő/Neusiedler See, Hungary, 6 April 2011. Photo: Bouke ten Cate / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0. Representative image for this story; not an animal or scene from the reported study. · CC BY 4.0 · Source

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