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Science

Flying Snakes 25

Posted by michael from the chinese-needle-snakes dept.
belgin writes "For those who never cease to be fascinated by the strange stuff you can find on our own planet, add snakes to the list of animals that can 'fly' without real wings. CNN's story covers this interesting phenomenon. Chicago researcher Jake Socha, says that the Singapore Paradise tree snakes glide as well as flying squirrels without the assistance of wing flaps. He is using a pair of cameras and unnamed software to construct a 3D biomechanical model of what the snakes do that lets them glide. This may inspire a few more cool projects. Apparently, the Twin-barred and Golden tree snakes from the same area pulls the same stunt. FlyingSnake.org, Socha's web site, might be a good place to start for more details, but it seems rather under construction."
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Flying Snakes More

Flying Snakes

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  • well, this is all we need, snakes that can come @ us from the air

    add that to the list of things to be afraid of when outside

    now i can never leave the house!!!
  • "You can do anything if you try hard enough"
    Me: "It doesn't matter how hard I flap my arms, I'll never be able to fly!"

    Only now I see it can be done!

    'Xcuse me while I go stand out in the middle of a field and flap my arms like a airtraffic conductor having an epilectic seizure.

  • human potential (Score:2, Interesting)

    by liquidice5 ( 570814 )
    Maybe they could create a large scale version of this, for sky diving covertly, if it worked, they might be able to make un detectable parachutes that are long and snake-like

    I do not know the mechanics of something like this, but it would be cool if it would work

    also, does anyone know if radar can detect regular parachutes, because you would think it could, but then again, rampant guessing is amuck
    • Kind of like the model rockets I used to fire up in the sky that had streamers instead of parachutes; very noisy flapping sounds.

    • Re:human potential (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DavidYaw ( 447706 )
      I don't know if radar can detect the parachutes, but it can detect the parachutist. Some of the guys I work with used to work on military radar, and one time they told me a story about going to the testing grounds in Arizona, and there were a couple of people sky diving that day, and the sky divers thought it was really cool that they could see this nice smooth arc of their fall on the radar screen. (The story was told from the perspective of "stupid sky divers were thrilled to have a couple thousand watts of radio energy pointed at them", but the point remains...)

      So regardless of whether radar can pick up the parachute or a weird snake-shaped parachute, it can still pick up the parachutist.

  • Heh, love how science works (Score:3, Funny)

    by Guru1 ( 521726 ) on Friday August 09, 2002 @03:02PM (#4041783)
    Quote from the article:
    "Occasionally, when the snake wouldn't move, I'd give it a prod", Socha says, "and sit there and wait and hope it would jump off." Socha says none of the reptiles got hurt during these flying exercises, done at the Singapore Zoological Gardens.

    Science words translated as: The stupid snake wouldn't fly for me, so I pushed him off the branch.

    • that sounds a lot like the (true!) urban legend about Disney filmmakers forcing lemmings to jump off a cliff [snopes.com]. Contrary to popular belief, lemmings do not commit suicide en masse or leap from cliffs. However, Disney did not want reality to prevent a good movie.

      • mid-1950s Wernher von Braun and Heinz Haber built the Rocket to the Moon ride for Tomorrowland, the first Disney theme park. Both were ex-Nazis.
        Heinz had done high-speed high-altitude tests on prisonners at Dachau.

        Disney isn't the cleanest corporation!

        Back to snake flight...Animal flight is generally hard to replicate. Wasps have extremely complicated beat patterns. This snake gliding will be much easier to simulate.

  • Big deal (Score:3, Funny)

    by Violet Null ( 452694 ) on Friday August 09, 2002 @04:06PM (#4042306)
    Gold dragons have been able to fly without wings since 1st edition AD&D.

  • Snakes... (Score:2, Funny)

    by docbrown42 ( 535974 )
    Why does it have to be snakes? [imdb.com]

    -Ed

    docbrown.net [docbrown.net]
    Graphic Design, Web Design, Role-Playing Games...all the good stuff
  • Imagine a beowulf cluster of those! Talk about having good physical security!

    (somebody had to say it)

  • On a visit a few years ago John showed me a clip with the flying snakes. I didn't realize how cool they were until he showed the clip on a regular snake being dropped 10 meters. I think it just kinda dropped like a rock.
    I thought i was funny how they phrased his Teach For America stint: Socha, a former schoolteacher; probably better than a student for all but 2 of the last 25 years...

  • At some point, they'll realize that all creatures can fly (under the proper circumstances). Of course, the best way to prove this to the hard-core skeptics (take an elephant, a trebuchete, and an attorney into a large open field...) will doublessly get PETA all miffed at you.

    -- MarkusQ

  • nope, must be a fraud (Score:4, Funny)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Saturday August 10, 2002 @09:52AM (#4045465) Homepage
    And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.
    • Genesis 3:14
  • I'd just like to respond to a few of the posts here to clarify a few things. It's very difficult to convey to the press the full extent of your work - they mainly just want the main findings and a few pithy quotes. My problem is that I'm currently finishing my dissertation, and haven't published the majority of my work (which will trickle out over the next few years), so a lot of the info isn't out there yet.

    As for Guru1's translation ("The stupid snake wouldn't fly for me, so I pushed him off the branch.") - that's not actually true. Pushing the snakes off the branch would do nothing for me - although the snakes would be fine and would still glide (as I've seen when they just fall), the data would be useless, and I'd be wasting my time. What I'd actually do is this: I'd place a snake on the branch, and then wait for it to do its thing. Sometimes they'd jump right off, and then other times (being tree snakes), they would be perfectly comfortable just hanging out. When that happened, I tried to irritate it enough that it would want to get away from me, usually by tapping the branch, moving closer and closer to the snake until I was tapping it on the tail and rear body. Sometimes that wasn't even enough, it just couldn't be bothered and was content to stay there, so I'd have to remove it from the branch and move on to the next snake. (And sometimes all they did was strike at me. Can't blame them.)

    As for the comment that at some point we'll realize that all creatures can fly - I know that this was half written in jest, but that's not true either. Size is a critical factor in relation to ability fly. That's because for the most part, aerodynamic force generation is proportional to surface area, but weight is proportional to volume. So when an animal increases in length, its weight increases much faster than its surface area. In other words, if you put flying squirrel-type skin flaps on a human, he/she certainly won't glide like a flying squirrel because of the high weight-to-area ratio. (This is why those early films of people trying to fly this way, crashing down a cliff, look so silly.) Some of the snakes I've worked with are true gliders, which is amazing for an animal with its cylinder-esque body plan. But even within these snakes, the largest ones (of C. ornata) don't seem to be able to glide - at 300 grams or so, they're too big.
  • Get them out! Get them out!

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