By Nicholas Bakalar
May 26, 2022 - NY Times - Posted again yesterday by the NY Times
With the greatest of ease it twists and turns from the tops of redwood trees.
Flying salamanders? Well, not quite, but there is a species called the wandering salamander that lives in the tallest trees on earth, and can do a very convincing imitation of flight, parachuting from great heights on its way down to another branch, another tree or the ground.
There are other animals without wings that can coast safely through the air. The flying squirrel may be the archetype, and some spiders, lizards and frogs can sail through the air and come in for a soft landing. Most have obvious control surfaces — the skin flaps of the flying squirrel are a good example. But wandering salamanders, which live in the tops of California redwoods, look almost identical to closely related species that never go airborne.
In a study published Monday in Current Biology, researchers tested the skills of arboreal and ground-dwelling salamanders using a wind tunnel to simulate flight from the tops of trees.
“We climb trees to study them,” said Christian E. Brown, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of South Florida and an author of the study, “but studying the flight is difficult in nature, almost impossible. For that, we needed the wind tunnel.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/science/salamanders-gliding-redwoods.html?campaign_id=49&emc=edit_ca_20240502&instance_id=122137&nl=california-today®i_id=31862559&segment_id=165413&te=1&user_id=95c7d611c407fb53bfbbfbdc6aca6b55
Greg
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