We’ve always believe nature is so
amazing and its creations sometimes baffle the humans minds. Who is the
creature of these bewilder species. Have you ever heard a snake can fly? Yes;
Chrysopelea, is famous for flying, actually belongs to the family Colubridae.
Flying snakes are not too much venomous and considered harmless. Its toxicity
is not dangerous to peoples. Normally flying snake can be found in South Asian
countries such as Philippines, China, India and Sri Lanka. Chrysopelea is notorious
for “flying Snake” glides by using its ridge scales along its belly, pushing
against rough bark surface of tree trunks, letting it to move vertically up a
tree. Chrysopelea hunts for foods during the day, and they like lizards, frogs,
birds and bats.
When he reaches the end of a tree’s
branch the snake continues moving until its tail dangles from the branch end,
and then it makes a J-Shape bend leans forward to select the level of inclination
it wishes to travel to control its flight paths, as well as selecting a desired
landing area. Once it decides on a endpoint,
it pushes itself by thrusting its body up and away from the tree, sucking in
its stomach, flaring out its ribs to turn its body in a "pseudo concave
wing” all the while making a repeated serpentine motion of lateral undulation
parallel to the ground to stabilize its direction in midair in order to land safe
and sound.
The mixture of sucking in its
stomach and making a motion of lateral undulation in the air makes it viable
for the snake to glide in the air, where it also copes to keep energy compared
to travel on the ground and dodge terrestrial bounded predators. The concave
wing that a snake generates in sucking its stomach flattens its body to up to double
its width from back of the head to the anal vent, which is adjacent to the end
of the snake's tail, causes the cross section of the snake's body to look like
the cross section of a Frisbee or flying disc. When a flying disc spins in the
air, the designed cross sectional concavity causes intensified air pressure
under the center of the disc, causing lift for the disc to fly. A snake incessantly
moves in lateral undulation to generate the identical effect of increased air
pressure underneath its arched body to glide.
It’d be interesting to know that
flying snakes are capable to glide better than flying squirrels and other
gliding animals, notwithstanding the lack of limbs, wings, or any other
wing-like projections, gliding through the forest and jungle it inhabits with
the distance being as great as 100 m. In the recent research conducted by the
University of Chicago, the snake ability to glide has been an object of interest
for physicists, and they found a correlation between size and gliding ability,
in which smaller flying snakes were able to glide longer distance horizontally.
So far there’re five recognized
species of flying snake, found them India to Indonesian archipelago. Some of
them are Golden Tree Snake (Ornate Flying Snake), the largest flying snake
having 4ft in length, with different color variations. Due to its smaller size
it’s gliding ability is weak. The other is Paradise tree snake, is a flying
snake reaches up to 3ft in length and is
famous in the European pet trade. The most famous coloration bodies are black, covered
in rich green scales, clusters of red, orange and yellow-colored scales in the
shape of flower petals line the dorsal area from the base of the neck to the
tail. It’s gliding ability is considered one of the best among the flying
snakes. Twin-barred tree snake also called banded flying snake, is the smallest
flying snake reaching up to 2ft in length, with the base color is black or dark
grey, and the entire body is covered with thick red and thin yellow with black
bands. it does not glide.