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Scientist have discovered flying snakes.Flying snake is a misnomer, since, barring a strong updraft, these animals can’t actually gain altitude. Biomechanist Jake Socha of Virginia Tech and his colleagues launched one such species of “flying” snakes, Chrysopelea paradise, from a 15-meter tall tower, then videotaped and analyzed the snakes’ exact body positions throughout their flights.Four cameras recorded the curious snakes as they glided. This allowed them to create and analyze 3-D reconstructions of the animal’s body positions during flight — work that Socha recently presented at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) meeting in Long Beach, CA.
The reconstructions were coupled with an analytical model of gliding dynamics and the forces acting on the snakes’ bodies. The analyses revealed that the reptiles, despite traveling up to 24 meters from the launch platform, never achieved an “equilibrium gliding” state — one in which the forces generated by their undulating bodies exactly counteract the force pulling the animals down, causing them to move with constant velocity, at a constant angle from the horizon. Nor did the snakes simply drop to the ground.
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