Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Slow worm
Anguis fragilis — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The slow worm looks exactly like a small bronze snake, but it is not a snake at all: it is a lizard whose legs disappeared long ago. Two simple checks give it away, because it blinks and it can drop its tail.
Picture credit: Agnieszka Kwiecień, Nova (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Hans Hillewaert (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the slow worm live?
Home: under stones and in long grass.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy, Spain, Austria, Sweden.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 40–45 cm, rarely up to 57 cm. It weighs about 0.03 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
Snakes cannot blink, because their eyes sit under a clear fixed scale; a slow worm has proper eyelids and closes them, and that is the surest sign that it is a lizard. If a bird or a cat grabs it, the tail breaks off at a built-in weak spot and keeps wriggling while the animal escapes, and only a short blunt stump grows back. Its tongue is broad and just slightly notched instead of deeply forked, and tiny ear openings hide under the scales. Slow worms hunt slowly and mostly eat slugs, snails and earthworms, so a gardener is lucky to have them. Instead of laying eggs, the female gives birth to eight to twelve live young in late summer. They can grow amazingly old: over thirty years in the wild, and one animal in a zoo reached fifty-four.
Find it on the globe
Slow worm is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How do I know a slow worm is not a snake?
Watch its eyes: it blinks, and no snake can do that. Its body is also smooth and even all the way along, with a blunt head no wider than the neck and a broad, barely notched tongue.
Where do slow worms live?
Nearly everywhere in Europe, from Britain to the Balkans. It likes gardens, meadows, woodland edges and compost heaps, anywhere warm and damp with plenty of hiding places.
Does the tail grow back?
Only partly. The new tail stays short and blunt and often has a different colour, and the animal can use the trick just once, so it saves it for real danger.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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