For animals that reside within the treetops, gliding is an energy-efficient technique for making a fast getaway from potential predators or acquiring a tasty deal with from the neighboring tree. It’s maybe unsurprising then that gliding has independently advanced in lots of completely different vertebrate teams.1 Most of those animals—like flying squirrels, sugar gliders, and Draco lizards—have developed massive, wing-like folds of pores and skin between their fore- and hindlimbs to create elevate and stop them from merely plummeting to the bottom.
The paradise tree snake, in fact, has no limbs to which such a membrane could be connected, and its noodle-shaped physique doesn’t appear perfect for producing elevate or stability— but in some way it is ready to glide for a number of meters. That is precisely the sort of biophysical thriller that Jake Socha, an organismal biomechanics researcher at Virginia Tech, is drawn to unravel. “I’m very drawn to issues that appear like they should not work,” he stated.
Socha’s work revealed that in gliding, the snake’s physique form transforms: usually vaguely round in cross-section, the snake splays its ribs open, forming a triangle with a large, barely concave backside. When Socha’s group analyzed the aerodynamic properties of this form, they discovered that it generated surprisingly excessive quantities of elevate when tilted at a 35-degree angle, figuring out a mechanism that contributed to the snake’s gliding potential.2
Researchers additionally questioned how the reptile maintained stability within the air, executing a easy glide relatively than a tumbling fall. Making the most of a four-story black field efficiency house on campus, Socha’s group used high-speed movement seize to exactly measure the snake’s actions in the course of the glide and develop a mathematical mannequin. Utilizing the mannequin, they decided that the noticed side-to-side undulation within the air—much like the basic serpentine slither that snakes use to get round on land—boosted stability throughout gliding.3
