The scientists in charge of the investigation studied the small amphibians of California to learn more regarding this behavior. Through a video they recorded this curious ability of animals.
The adaptation of animals is a fairly common situation in nature and has occurred in countless species of the animal kingdom. This is the case of some small parachuting salamanderswhose behavior changed to survive.
Because these amphibians inhabit the secuoyas -giant trees resistant to icy climates-, they learned to glide and maneuver in the air to avoid certain death when falling from a great height.
This ability has also been recorded in other species, such as flying squirrels, frogs, geckos, ants, and other insects, which use similar aerial maneuvers to jump between trees or when falling, to stay in the trees and avoid landing on the ground.
Similarly, researchers suspect that this California salamander’s parachuting abilities are a form of return to a tree from which it fell or jumped, to avoid terrestrial predators.
“While parachuting, they have an exquisite amount of maneuverable control,” he said in a communiqué Christian Browndoctoral candidate at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa and first author of an article published in the journal Current Biology regarding these behaviors.
Maneuvers captured on video
The aerial prowess of the so-called wandering salamander (Aneides vagrans) was revealed by high-speed video footage taken in a wind tunnel at the University of California, Berkeley, where salamanders were pushed from a perch into a column of air moved upwards to produce a simulated free fall.
“What struck me when I first saw the videos is that (the salamanders) are smooth: there is no discontinuity in their movements, they are just floating in the air,” he said. Robert DudleyUC Berkeley integration professor, biologist, and animal flight expert.
“That, to me, implies that this behavior is something deeply embedded in their motor response, that (the drop) must occur at reasonably high frequencies to affect selection for this behavior. And it’s not just passive skydiving, they’re not just skydiving down. Clearly, they’re also doing the lateral movement, which is what we’d call sliding,” she added.
An unexpected ability in this type of amphibian
The behavior is all the more surprising because salamanders, aside from having slightly larger footpads, are no different from other salamanders in that they are not maneuverable in the air. They don’t have flaps of skin, for example, to tell you regarding their ability to parachute.
“Wandering salamanders have big feet, they have long legs, they have active tails. All of these things lend themselves to aerial behaviors. But everyone assumed it was for scaling, because that’s what they use those features for when we’re looking at them,” Brown said.
“So it’s not really a dedicated aerodynamic control surface, but it works as both. It helps them climb, and it seems to help them parachute and glide as well,” she added.
Among the questions the researchers hope to answer in future research are how salamanders manage to parachute and maneuver without obvious anatomical adaptations for gliding and whether many other animals with similar aerial abilities have never been noted before.
