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Flying Snakes Can Travel Remarkable Distances, Now Scientists Know How - NPR
Jun 29, 2020 1 min, 38 secs

The snake Chrysopelea paradisi is seen in Malaysia's Taman Negara National Park.

Flying snakes like Chrysopelea paradisi, the paradise tree snake, normally live in the trees of South and Southeast Asia.

How far they can go really depends on how high up they are when they jump, says Jake Socha at Virginia Tech, who has studied these snakes for almost a quarter-century.

Part of the way the snakes do this is by flattening out their bodies, he says.

And so on the ground, on a tree, in the water, they are creating these side-to-side waves," Socha says.

After convincing decision-makers that the snakes wouldn't get hurt or escape from The Cube, Socha and his colleagues prepared the arena by putting foam padding down on the floor and sticking a fake tree in there to serve as a target for a flying creature.

For Isaac Yeaton, a mechanical engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, these experiments were the first time he ever got to see a flying snake really do its thing.

The snakes often bounced up off the foam padding on the floor, as nearby snake handlers waited to pick up the animal after it landed, he recalls.

Yeaton says they found that the undulation has some distinct features in addition to the broad S-shaped horizontal movements that are easiest to see.

We weren't expecting to see this," says Yeaton, who says the only other example of this he's aware of is in sidewinder snakes that move across the sand

The researchers used all of the information they'd gathered about these movements to create a computer model: a virtual representation of a flying snake

What they found, says Yeaton, is that without undulation, the snakes' glides became unstable — the flying critters would plummet or tumble

The snakes' undulation in the air, she says, "actually seems to have a pretty important consequence for their movement."

She thinks this would be interesting to explore in biologically inspired, flying robot snakes

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