Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff learn volabah here. Flying animals are common, but not particularly diverse. Birds, bats, insects, and pterosaurs, being the extinct relatives of dinosaurs that had complex wing membranes, are the only four groups of organisms that have ever evolved the ability to fly. But what about the so called flying snake. These reptiles can't actually fly.
They more fall with style allah buzz light year. They can glide over long horizontal distances despite their lack of wings. There are five known species of snakes within the flying snake genus. The smallest is the banded flying snake, which measures in it just two feet long or about sixty centimeters. The biggest species, called the ornate flying snake, can get up to four feet long that's one and a half meters. Rounding out this little quintet are the Paradise tree snake,
the Moluccan flying snake, and the Indian flying snake. These creatures are tree dwellers that live in the rainforests of South and Southeast Asia. Being gliders and not true flyers, they don't produce thrust when they go airborne. This renders them incapable of traveling upwards through the air. Gliders are actually really common in Asia's southeastern rainforests. These ecosystems include
gliding squirrels, gliding frogs, and various gliding lizards. Biologists don't know what makes the trait so widespread there, but it might have something to do with a family of large trees that's common in the area, the terracarps. These trees can grow some two hundred feet tall that's about sixty meters. The lower halves of their trunks are pretty much branchless,
which is a huge inconvenience for tree climbing animals. It's possible that all of these unrelated critters evolved the ability to glide as a way of getting from tree top to tree top more easily. It sure beats scampering up and down limbless trunks all day, especially when you're a snake with nothing to enable scampering. Flying snakes have somewhat mysterious habits out in the wild. For the article this episode is based on how Stuff Works. Spoke via email
with herpetologist Jake Soka. He said, we actually don't know why they glide. There are no studies that address the topic I've been interested for years, but anecdotally I have seen them use it for escape from me and other people, and it's also possible and likely that they use it for effect of locomotion to move to another tree or to the ground in a short time, or to avoid
slithering over substrates where they could encounter a predator. A professor at Virginia Tech with ay focus on the biomechanics of animals, Soca, has been studying these snakes for over two decades and has co authored several papers about their burial antics. Flying snakes are particularly interesting because they're the only animal with no limbs that also glides. When a flying snake launches itself off of some tree or other elevated surface, its ribs splay outwards, flattening the animal from
neck to nether regions. The process helps the snakes create lift and upward acting physical force that airplanes take advantage of by making their bodies more aerodynamic. What this does to their internal organs is another mystery, but the method gets results. Flying snakes have been seen gliding across horizontal distances of over three hundred feet that's one hundred meters. Flying snakes do undulate in a slithering motion while they glide,
which begs an interesting question. Do they do this because it helps the gliding process somehow, or is it just a useless habit, a behavioral relic of slithering over solid surfaces. Soka and his fellow researchers observed seven paradise tree snakes gliding in a controlled indoor environment, specifically a four story black box theater at Virginia Tech. Using high speed cameras and motion capture tech, they broke down the choreography of the glide that in turn allowed them to build a
three D digital model of the reptiles. They found that a flying snake will undulate both horizontally and vertically while it glides. Simulations with the three D model show that this complex form of slithering keeps the snakes stable and on course during their airborne trecks. Earlier studies had revealed that flying snakes can change direction mid glide, and learned that they'll often dangle from a tree limb and twist the fronts of their bodies into a distinct J shaped
loop right before taking off. Flying snakes belong to the biggest family of modern serpents, the colibrids, along with everything from corn snakes to garter snakes to kingsnakes. The flying snakes are mildly venomous, but not dangerous to humans. Their fixed rear fangs will make a bite swell a bit, but the it's the absolute worst. The creatures are die
neural hunting birds, bats, lizards, and frogs. In broad daylight, flying snakes slither up tree trunks to the highest branches, using their entire body to grab a hold of bark and other rough surfaces on the trunk. None of the five known species are deemed endangered, though herpetologists have expressed a bit of concern about how the banded flying might be faring these days. And this is where I wish we weren't an audio only podcast. The next time you
have a chance, look up video of flying snakes. They are weird and beautiful. Today's episode is based on the article the flying snake doesn't fly so much as fall with style on how Stuffworks dot Com, written by Mark Mancini. Brain Stuff is production of ByHeart Radio in partnership with how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show. I was