Here’s What Happens To Snakes In Microgravity

In honor ofWorld Snake Day , which is today , here ’s what happens when you put a gang of snakes on a aeroplane … for science .

Most animals comprehend the weightlessness of microgravity as if they were falling upside down . If you drop a cat from a great peak , for exemplar , it will roll over to assay to land on its feet . This is call the “ righting answer . ” In microgravity , this guide to reprize peal - over .

scientist have interpreted the repeat rolling - over as a repetitive righting reply , since the fauna never get any feedback that the action was successfully executed . This behavioral pattern is vulgar and has been observed for various mammalian , frogs , and turtles in microgravity .

http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/sep/17/frogs-in-space-one-giant-leap

But other herptiles ( reptiles and amphibians ) have very different responses to microgravity . Some snakes aggressively attack their own bodies ; caecilians ( which resemble snakes , but are amphibians ) run to become immobile and lose sinew tension ; certain Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree - frogs engage in dive behavior .

That tree frog think that they ’re dive makes a great deal of horse sense . Caecilians may become limp simply because these animals , which live out their lives in the ground like wiggler , never have the possibility of falling , and thus never develop strong righting responses .

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But why would snakes attack their own bodies ? That ’s where things get really interesting . Could it be that the ego - directed aggressiveness was the final result of a loss ofproprioception ? Perhaps in microgravity , a Hydra ca n’t recognize its own body as part of its own self .

In this bailiwick , the investigator adulterate a bunch of snakes onto aVomit Comet . These are woodworking plane that vaporize in parabola : as the plane move over the top of the curve , everything deep down is temporarily weightless . At the bottom of the curved shape , it the pulling of sobriety actually feels a bit stronger .

Here ’s a picture of one snake , Elaphe obsoleta , in microgravity . In the first parabola , the snake eventually tangle its tail end and ceased all other torso movements . In the second parabola the serpent knotted its whole body and once again ceased affect while in microgravity . This posture was held through the next parabola and in the intervening fourth dimension between the parabolas .

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While the investigator did n’t discover the ego - attack behaviors insure antecedently , the knotting behaviour that they did observe in many of their Snake still reflects a basic passing of proprioception . When snakes become stressed out , they sometimes bunch together in a group so as to slow down . Which , in a way , is on the nose what that airborne snake did in microgravity .

In the absence seizure of gravity , it appears as if Snake have a difficulty distinguishing self from non - self . The snake managed to relax , but only because it did n’t realise that it was working to loosen its own self ! At least , that ’s the supposition .

The authors say that given the variation seen among the various species that have been subjugate to lightness , “ one must be conservative in selecting specie as model organisms for orbital quad flight experiments . Clearly , not all animals react the same to microgravity even when they have similar morphology , ecology , and evolutionary history . ”

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