Slow worm

admin
, 25 August 2017
Slow worm
slow worm with young / Derek Middleton

By Charlotte Owen
WildCall Officer

The friendly face of the slow worm is a familiar sight in many Sussex gardens and allotments, where it helpfully feasts on the less desirable denizens like slugs and grubs. Its name is friendly too but perhaps a bit deceptive, since it is neither slow nor a worm. It’s not a snake either, although it does look like one, but is actually an elongated lizard without any legs.

The slow worm leads a semi-fossorial lifestyle, spending much of the time underground, and legs would just get in the way when squeezing through burrows, slithering under stones and sliding through vegetation. Its serpentine appearance earned it the Old English name wyrm, a label broadly applied to anything that crept or crawled, from adders to dragons. A closer look reveals several distinctive features that distinguish the slow worm from our native snakes: its body doesn’t taper at the neck but is uniformly tubular; it has external ears, or tympanic apertures; and it can blink, which might be why it’s also known as the blindworm.


But why ‘slow’?It’s probably not speed-related, although they do tend to stay put when disturbed rather than immediately dart away, and like all reptiles they can be a bit sluggish in colder weather.Instead, it’s likely to stem from the Old English word slawyrm, with sla meaning strike – another generic term applied to any biting, striking or venomous creature. Of course, the slow worm doesn’t fall into any of these categories but folklore declared that it could sting, which explains Shakespeare’s reference in Macbeth to “blind worm’s sting” being stirred into the witches’ cauldron. In reality the slow worm’s defence mechanism is to shed its tail, which keeps wriggling for long enough to distract a predator while the real worm escapes into the safety of the undergrowth. For this ability, the slow worm was given the Latin name Anguis fragilis, meaning fragile snake. While this isn’t quite right either, the advantage of a Latin name is that everyone will know exactly which species you’re referring to, regardless of what the locals happen to call it.

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Comments

  • Jo:

    Found a baby slow worm today, how many babies will a slow worm have at a time? [email protected]

    14 Oct 2019 17:50:00

  • Arthur aged 3:

    Just seen my first slow worm on a walk.

    08 Jun 2020 17:24:00

  • Michael Russell:

    Just pulling up tuft of grass that had grown through weed membrane which left 5 baby slowworms wrigling on hot plastic membrane.
    In my garden in Haywards Heath.

    17 May 2022 13:39:00

  • Deborah Mitchell:

    I have quite a few slow worms in my compost heap. I am very aware of them being there. So I’m very careful when I need compost. I won’t disturb the compost when it is time for the babies to appear

    10 Jun 2022 19:36:00

  • Jo:

    Absolutely gutted. My partner mowed over a slow worm we’d been seeing quite a bit around our compost heap. What a lump! Should’ve seen it. Why oh why didn’t I check the grass. Poor thing 😭

    18 Sep 2022 14:10:00

  • Funkyal Ashton:

    I think one my partners cats has chased one into hiding and it’s perished in the heat it had dropped its tail and I had though it was bitten off and after now identification of its species I understand what happened Hastings’s East Sussex thanks for the information and pictures

    07 Apr 2025 00:08:00

  • Pauline Holbrook:

    Iv had at least 6 slow worms over the past few months in my garden.

    15 Jun 2026 17:40:00

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