  Taming the instabilities inherent to many nonlinear optical phenomena is of
paramount importance for modern photonics. In particular, the so-called snake
instability is universally known to severely distort localized wave stripes,
leading to the occurrence of transient, short-lived dynamical states that
eventually decay. The phenomenon is ubiquitous in nonlinear science, from river
meandering to superfluids, and to date it remains apparently uncontrollable.
However, here we show that optical snake instabilities can be harnessed by a
process that leads to the formation of stationary and robust two-dimensional
zigzag states. We find that such new type of nonlinear waves exists in the
hyperbolic regime of cylindrical micro-resonators and it naturally corresponds
to two-dimensional frequency combs featuring spectral heterogeneity and
intrinsic synchronization. We uncover the conditions of the existence of such
spatiotemporal photonic snakes and confirm their remarkable robustness against
perturbations. Our findings represent a new paradigm for frequency comb
generation, thus opening the door to a whole range of applications in
communications, metrology, and spectroscopy.
