At its core, Zootopia 2 is a defense against snakes. The Oscar-nominated sequel to Zootopia centers on an unlikely pair of animal police officers – Judy Hopps, a rabbit, and her fox partner, Nick Wilde – who work together to solve the mystery surrounding the family of a surprisingly lovable pit viper named Gary De’Snake. Along the way, they discover why snakes like Gary were driven out of the city of Zootopia.
In the world of the film, reptiles – but especially snakes – are outcasts from mammal-centric society. But the stigma, Gary (voiced by Ke Huy Quan) tells Hopps, is misplaced: “Snakes never hurt anybody,” he explains to the rabbit (Ginnifer Goodwin). “We’re not the bad guys.” Gary inspires Hopps and Wilde (Jason Bateman) to try to prove that snakes aren’t so bad and bring them back to Zootopia.
Gary’s story is a bit of a change of pace from the usual villainous role of snakes in Hollywood (see the jungle book, the Harry Potter franchise, Snakes on a plane, Anaconda) and the perception of them in human societies more broadly (see Genesis). But from a scientific standpoint, there are extremely good reasons to keep snakes around: they are a critical part of the ecosystem.
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If snakes were somehow excluded from the animal world, as they were from society i zootopia 2, it would almost certainly have disastrous consequences. “If they were to disappear, we’d be in big trouble,” says Emily Taylor, director of the Physiological Ecology of Reptiles Laboratory (PERL) at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
Snakes are “mesopredators,” meaning they eat small rodents, such as squirrels and mice, but are also eaten by other predators themselves, such as hawks, owls, badgers and coyotes, Taylor says. “Because of that, they play a doubly important role in ecosystem health.” In other words, eliminating them from the animal kingdom would be like pulling a whole row of Jenga blocks out of the center of the tower.
Perhaps the bigger effect is on the snakes’ prey: eliminating the reptiles would mean rodents would be left without a key predator, allowing rats and mice to reproduce unchecked, Taylor says, “and they would overrun the planet.”
“It would lead to a massive clearing of vegetation, including everything from our native plants out there to our crops,” she adds.
This fear is backed up by science: In a 2024 study, a group of Australian researchers estimated that each year a single adult eastern brown snake eats about 50 mice, possibly more. At their usual density levels in Australian farmland, the researchers estimated that brown snakes alone could remove thousands of mice annually for every square kilometer of farmland.
By extension, snakes also help keep rodent-borne diseases—hantavirus, bubonic plague, Lyme disease, and more—under control. Snakes can occasionally carry Salmonella, but generally speaking, snake diseases don’t pose nearly as much risk to humans as rodents do, Taylor says.
Snakes can also act as “ecosystem engineers” by helping with seed dispersal, recent research shows. In January, a team of researchers found that western diamondback rattlesnakes, which eat small mammals that eat and digest seeds, can “save” the seeds by throwing them out. This process also provides “a little bit of fertilizer,” Taylor explains, helping the seeds germinate.
Despite all these advantages, snakes are among the most important phobias of humans. In a 2001 Gallup poll, for example, Americans said they were more afraid of snakes than anything else they were asked about, including “being confined in a small space,” “needles and getting shots,” “heights,” and “public speaking.”
Our fear is not entirely without merit. Gary’s claim that snakes “never hurt anyone” is not entirely true: snakebites kill an estimated 81,410 to 137,880 people globally each year, according to the World Health Organization. And climate change is going to make snakebites much more likely, recent research suggests. In the United States, snakebite deaths are much lower, representing about five people per year, partly because we have better access to medical care, says Taylor.
But portraying snakes solely as “villains” in pop culture only serves to exacerbate people’s fear of the reptiles, Taylor says, which she thinks is unfortunate.
“When people can see that snakes are actually gentle and they don’t want anything to do with humans – and can appreciate them from a distance – then I think that can lead to an appreciation of snakes and not a fear of snakes,” she says.
