Although snakes have no limbs, this does not prevent them from rushing easily through the ground or water without the need for feet or fins, and through the oscillation of their bodies these subtle creatures can move easily, to the point that some of them can fly.
The snake of the tree of Paradise (Chrysopelea paradisi), who lives in Southeast Asia, is known for its ability to fly in the air from one tree to another with the help of his smooth body.
A team of American researchers used a three-dimensional model to show the wave movement that enables this strange snake to fly, and their results were published in the journal Nature Physics on June 29.
A mechanical miracle bio
The rare snake of the tree of Paradise can fly tens of meters in the air and then circumvent by 90 degrees to change its direction. When it flies from a high position, its body ripples in the air in a series of strange twists and lands straight up a few meters away.
Jake Susha - who works in biomedical engineering at the Virginia Tech Technical Institute - has studied these flying snakes for more than 20 years and considered their acrobatic movements a mechanical biological miracle.
While Susha admits that snakes do not fly practically, he sees that their strategic glides are still a wonderful achievement for a non-party animal.
By creating a three-dimensional model of the air ripples of this snake it turns out that these vibrations are necessary for the dynamic stability of flight, making the snakes vertically slip for a longer period.
Without these aerial acrobatics, team results indicate that the snake of the Tree of Paradise will not go away at all, and it is possible that his head will first head to Earth, or land in another dangerous direction.
Display stars
The study began in 2015 when researchers transformed the "cube" - a 4-storey theater from a black box with 23 high-speed cameras used to capture drama and dance moves - to an inner sliding square, but in this case the stars of the show were flying snakes.
By placing an infrared reflective tape on their bodies in different locations, the researchers were able to use a motion capture system to record snake movements from all angles.
Using 11 to 17 reference points from head to tail, the team saw 7 different snakes leaping from an oak branch of 8.3 meters high to the lowest artificial tree.
By treating this dynamic model, researchers tested how certain ripples of motion horizontally and vertically affect the flying snakes.
The researchers believe that this ripple keeps the snake upright while sliding in the air instead of being quickly imbalanced by the forces of clouds and lifting.
Strong study
"What makes this study really powerful is that we have been able to develop our understanding of sliding dynamics and our ability to model the system dramatically," said Isaac Yitton, Virginia Tech, the lead engineer and lead author of the study, to the University News website.
"The flight of the snake is complicated, and there are many complications to make the mathematical model accurate, but it is satisfactory to add all the pieces together."
This knowledge not only tells us more about the flying snakes, it can also be a great addition in the field of robotics science, since snakes are excellent in moving through complex environments, which is something we want robots to do as well.
Jim Osherwood - who studies kinetic biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College in London and who was not involved in the study - believes that there are some questions that remain, such as: Are ripples adopted during slides to stabilize, or are they just behavioral remnants of snake movement?
"This chapter may be wrong: they may both be correct," he wrote in an article in the News and Views section of the journal Nature, commenting on the new study.