Snake Scaring Gorillas At Disney World Video Goes Viral

Visitors to Disney’s Animal Kingdom park in Orlando in June got a double dose of animal observation at theme park/zoo hybrid when a baby snake made its way into a gorilla enclosure and startled its inhabitants. The entire thing was caught on video and posted to TikTok where user @silkystrokesurvivor has three videos titled “Gorilla VS Snake,” the first of which has amassed over 15 million views on the social media platform. In the first post one of the younger apes notices the small snake before alerting the rest of the troop and attempting to fling it out of the hay pile that it has snuggled into. Watch it yourself below.

What makes this video so interesting from one perspective is that it appears to be the “snake detection hypothesis” in action. This line of thinking comes from University of California anthropology professor Lynne A Isbell who first wrote about it in a 2006 text. In essence the “snake detection hypothesis” has been linked to the evolution of snakes’ ability to hunt while remaining unseen and how that contrasts with the evolution of ancestral primates into spotting immobile snakes.

In a post on AEON about their theory and studies since its first publication, Isbell wrote in 2019:

“Since I proposed the snake detection theory, several studies have shown that nonhuman and human primates, including young children and snake-naive infants, have a visual bias toward snakes compared with other animate objects, such as lizards, spiders, worms, birds and flowers. Psychologists have discovered that we pick out images of snakes faster or more accurately than other objects, especially under cluttered or obscuring conditions that resemble the sorts of environments in which snakes are typically found. Snakes also distract us from finding other objects as quickly. Our ability to detect snakes faster is also more pronounced when we have less time to detect them and when they are in our periphery….Our long evolutionary exposure to snakes explains why ophiophobia is humanity’s most-reported phobia but also why our attraction and attention to snakes is so strong that we have even included them prominently in our religions and folklore.”

All that in mind, isn’t watching the above even MORE wild? Considering the rate at which Disney turns its properties into blockbuster movies though it’s only a matter of time before Gorilla vs Snake is playing in a theater near you.