A video showing a snake species flying through the air indicates the serpent can travel up to 30 meters from a towering tree through the Southeast Asian rainforest the journal of experimental biology reported.
They look like they are swimming," Jake Socha, a biomechanics researcher at Virginia Tech said in a statement. "But what keeps the reptiles aloft? They turn their whole body into one aerodynamic surface."
The snake species expand their ribs when in orbit, and lengthen their bodies to change to a semi-circular shape from a full circle the journal reported.
"It looks like someone's version of a UFO," Socha told the journal.
Socha and his team of Daniel Holden, Nicholas Cardwell, and Pavlos Vlachos made a rod from a 3D printer with similar attributes as the snakes body prior to it going along a water filled tank with more density and humidity than the rainforest contains to emulate the same air flows it experiences through the rainforest. Researchers applied water on the rod to realistically gauge how fast a snake moves through the habitat.
"The shape is unusual," Socha told the journal. "You never find this kind of shape in any other animal flyer; you don't find it in engineered flyers. We didn't know if that was a good shape to have."
'Maybe the snake does hold part of its body flat at some point, using it as a mechanism for control', explaining that twisting the body while airborne could allow the snakes to fine tune the forces on their bodies for precise flight control," Socha told the journal.
'If you make a rough estimate of the lift to drag ratio for the real animal, it appears to do better than what we got from this study," Socha said in a statement. "So even though this shape produced more lift than we were expecting, it doesn't get us the glide performance that snakes can attain, giving us a hint that there is something in what the animal is doing aerodynamically that is not captured by the cross-sectional shape alone," Socha said in the statement.
