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February 26, 2025 6 mins

Flying snakes don't really fly, but they can glide long distances from rainforst treetops. Learn what we know (and don't know!) about them in this episoe of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.howstuffworks.com/snakes/flying-snakes.htm

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:23):
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

(00:45):
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

(01:06):
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

(01:26):
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,

(01:49):
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

(02:11):
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,

(02:31):
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

(02:53):
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

(03:14):
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.

(03:35):
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

(03:56):
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

(04:19):
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

(04:40):
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

(05:03):
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

(05:24):
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

(05:46):
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.
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