Seriously? Yes, and not just on a plane. Jake Socha, a Virginia
Tech biologist, and his team recently completed a study that
sheds some light on how some of these creatures fly. They
reported their findings last week at the American Physical
Society Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting. Socha and his
colleagues used high-speed video cameras to record Chrysepolea
paradisi, one of five species of Asian tree-dwelling snakes, as
they launched off a 15m (49 ft) tower! You can see the amazing
footage here. This “flying” is an important technique for these
snakes. According to Live Science: When these snakes leap, it's
not to nosedive; it's to glide from tree to tree, a feat they
can accomplish at distances of at least 79 feet (24 m). Four
cameras recorded the curious snakes as they glided. This allowed
the scientists to create and analyze 3-D reconstructions of the
animals' body positions during flight. The researchers found
that the snakes never actually achieved a proper “glide” (where
the forces generated by their