Collegiate Times

The snake in flight.

These snakes don’t need to be on a plane in order to fly.

Or glide, rather. Virginia Tech biomechanics professor Jake Socha is on the forefront of new research investigating how paradise tree snakes from Southeast Asia are able to glide long distances from tree to tree.

“Questions regarding insect and bird — these have been going on for years, with research from groups all over the world,” Socha said. “With the snakes, we’re still at the beginning, and to me, that’s what’s interesting.”

Part of the funding for the research comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development side of the U.S. Department of Defense.

According to Eric Mazzacone, DARPA public affairs officer, the nine-month grant of $331,904 “supported modeling and simulation of gliding.”

Socha said DARPA is interested purely in understanding more about the snakes’ flight, and is not looking for applications of the findings, at least not yet.

“They did not say to me, ‘Next year we need a flying snake robot.’ What we’re doing here is basic research, for understanding basic mechanisms and understanding nature,” Socha said. “You really have to know these things in order to have anything applied.”

Socha and Ph.D. candidate Farid Jafari recently published their research in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, and presented the findings at a conference.

“A big part of my research is to understand the physics and biomechanics of snake gliding. This is a multi-year project,” Socha said. “What we know right now is still very basic.”

Among animals that can glide, the snakes are unique because they lack any obvious external body parts that act as wings.

“It doesn’t have flaps of skin like a flying squirrel, it doesn’t have wings that it splays out like a flying lizard, or really big pectoral fins like a flying fish,” Socha said. “The snake, you look at it and it’s just a snake.”

But when the snake jumps off a branch, it flattens its body in a way that forms a very particular shape. Socha compared the cross-sectional shape of the snake’s body in flight to the cross section of a Frisbee or flying saucer. In other words, the snake’s entire body acts as a wing.

But the secrets to its flight may lay not only in its cross-sectional winglike shape — the snake also coils up in an S shape and appears to almost slither through the air.

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A version of this article appeared in the Dec 7 issue of the Collegiate Times.