Fancy aerodynamics explain why some snakes are good gliders

MANY animals have mastered the trick of gliding through the forest canopy. Flying frogs stretch the webbing between the toes of their enlarged feet. Some lizards spread elongated ribs covered in flaps of skin. And the colugo, a strange South-East Asian mammal, can travel as much as 70 metres (230 feet) between trees by spreading a membrane of skin that connects its limbs. Despite a lack of obvious body parts that can double up as a decent pair of wings, some snakes, too, can glide for remarkable distances.

To discover how snakes manage it Jake Socha of Virginia Tech and his colleagues conducted a series of test flights with paradise tree snakes, a mildly venomous variety found in parts of Asia. They launched the snakes from the top of a 15-metre tower and used four video cameras to construct 3-D images of the animals’ trajectories. The results, just published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, show not only that flying snakes are surprisingly good aviators but also that they employ some complex aerodynamic tricks. …