Blood python (Python brongersmai) strike kinematics and forces are robust to variations in substrate geometry

Functional diversity of snake locomotor behaviors: A review of the biological literature for bioinspiration

Organismal solutions to natural challenges can spark creative engineering applications. However, most engineers are not experts in organismal biology, creating a potential barrier to maximally effective bioinspired design. In this review, we aim to reduce that barrier with respect to a group of organisms that hold particular promise for a variety of applications: snakes. Representing >10% of tetrapod vertebrates, snakes inhabit nearly every imaginable terrestrial environment, moving with ease under many conditions that would thwart other animals. To do so, they employ over a dozen different types of locomotion (perhaps well over). Lacking limbs, they have evolved axial musculoskeletal features that enable their vast functional diversity, which can vary across species. Different species also have various skin features that provide numerous functional benefits, including frictional anisotropy or isotropy (as their locomotor habits demand), waterproofing, dirt shedding, antimicrobial properties, structural colors, and wear resistance. Snakes clearly have much to offer to the fields of robotics and materials science. We aim for this review to increase knowledge of snake functional diversity by facilitating access to the relevant literature.

ECR Spotlight – Derek Jurestovsky

ECR Spotlight is a series of interviews with early-career authors from a selection of papers published in Journal of Experimental Biology and aims to promote not only the diversity of early-career researchers (ECRs) working in experimental biology during our centenary year, but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Derek Jurestovsky is an author on ‘ Blood python (Python brongersmai) strike kinematics and forces are robust to variations in substrate geometry’, published in JEB. Derek conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Henry Astley's lab at University of Akron, USA. He is now a Postdoctoral Scholar in the lab of Jonas Rubenson and Steve Piazza at Pennsylvania State University, USA, investigating squamate skeletal morphology, biomechanics and their distributions in the past, present and future.