Howto - Flying Snakes

Ant writes "Wired News' Furthermore mentions a University of Chicago researcher finally figured out exactly how the limbless reptiles pull off their amazingly effective bird imitations. 'Despite their lack of winglike appendages, flying snakes are skilled aerial locomotors,' said biologist Jake Socha. Here's how: First, they flatten their bodies from head to tail, making themselves 'Frisbee-like in form,' Socha said. Then, as the snake drops (or leaps!) from a tree branch, it sends S-shaped waves through its body, steadying itself as it glides through the air. One species can even turn mid-flight. There is more information, photographs, and even short QuickTime video clips on Jake's Flying Snakes Home Page."

Comments

Re:Wheres the flying part?

[Afrosheen]

Yeah, so they didn't fly, but we have Flying Squirrels who do vaguely the same thing, and I'm sure a lizard or two who do the same.

Basically they sensationalized it. It should be called Gliding Snakes. However, who'd want to read about gliding snakes? Nobody, that's who. Flying Snakes, otoh, are a whole different game!

A different view of evolution

[einhverfr]

Personally I doubt that you had a lot of snakes falling out of trees and going splat. This seems nearly as naive an interpretation of evolution as Lamark's.

Instead, I suspect that you have a situation like this: when the equalibrium is punctuated it fundamentally changes the environmental niches which are available. For example, if oyu have a drought, this changes the niches that the animals are forced to occupy. If oyu have a mass extinction, you have a lot of vacant niches, etc. If you have a year of abundance, niches get subdivided, etc.

I suspect that a group of snakes found themselves in a situation where they were able to live off the lizards in the trees and decided to stay there. If they fell, it probably hurt, but I doubt it was often lethal. However, those that could control their angle of descent would have had an advantage evolutionarily based on this control simply because it takes a lot of energy to climb back up the trees, one is more vulnerable, etc. So it is a series of very small steps not a couple of big ones. But these steps occur over a comparitively short time period. And lo and behold, the snakes fly :-)

As a say, natural selection is the process of adapting a species to an ecological niche. The evolution seems rapid at first, but once things are stabilized, you don't see much.