A snake is a crawling and carnivorous animal belonging to the reptiles.
Some 2900 species are comprised in the families of snakes among which there are boas, pythons, vipers... In every continent, except Antarctica, you might possibly walk on a snake.
Snakes are pipe-shaped legless animals with no ears and with a jaw that they can dislocate to swallow their preys. Actually, snakes have sometimes eyes bigger than their bellies and must open their jaw in a wide angle to sustain themselves.

A snake's skin is covered with scales. The color of their scales sometimes matches with the dominating shade of color in their environment: snakes living in a desert may sometimes have a yellow-colored skin. They have a forked tongue used as an olfactory vector: snakes “loose” their tongue to “smell” their prey. If they're satisfied with what they smell, they are ready to bite.
Big snakes like king-cobras eat other snakes, while some other have a 100% egg-based diet.
They sleep during the process of digestion that lasts for 48 hours!

The way snakes move depends on where they live: under the water, an aquatic snake makes undulations to create waves and can even speeds up. On the surface, a terrestrial snake usually laterally undulates, pushing its body against a rock or other objects to get pushed to the other side and to repeat the movement. An other lateral undulation called side-winding, can be performed by the snake to move: in this case, the animal sort of roll on itself from one side to the other, because its environment lacks of points of impact like rocks.

The relationship between men and snakes is a long and difficult one. Many legends portrayed snakes as the incarnation of evil. In the bible, in the genesis, the snake is a tempter and the source of all the wrongs: it pushed eve into eating an apple from the knowledge tree when God had strictly forbidden her to do so. It opened Eve and Adam to consciousness, and cursed them to be miserable. In the Book of Revelation, the snake is the symbol of Satan.

Snakes are feared by many people, because some of them release in your blood a fatal venom when they bites you. In the countryside, you'd better wear shoes to avoid snake's bites.