Flying snakes are the only species of snakes on Earth capable of gliding, taking advantage of fluid dynamic principles to leap from point to point among the trees. Because they undulate in the air, their unsteady vortex dynamics are critical to understanding their aerodynamics. Here, we present an integrated approach combining motion capture and high-fidelity kinematics reconstruction, and immersed boundary method based flow simulations with adaptive mesh refinement to investigate the three-dimensional vortex dynamics of a flying snake.
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