Jake Socha

Biomechanist Jake Socha studies unusual animal movements — motions with which animals are “pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.” He and the students working in his lab at Virginia Tech observe and collect data about flying snakes and other animals which move in unusual ways, such as frogs that seem to jump along the surface of the water. They also explore how blood and air circulate in the bodies of insects.

Imagine you had no wings and also no arms or legs. How would you move from place to place? When have you moved in an unusual way? Where were you? What were you doing?

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How can something with no wings — an animal that doesn’t even have arms or legs — fly? This question made Biomechanist Jake Socha very curious — so curious that he built his career around questions like it.

When he was a child, Jake loved to read books about science. “My mom brought me to the public library from a very young age and I would just check out a ton of books.”

At his Rhode Island and Virginia high schools, Jake spent time in the school library, reading Discover magazine to continue his exploration of science. He tells Math4Science that reading Discover was “the equivalent to scrolling on your phone now.” (How amazing it must feel years later to be the subject of an article in Discover.)

”My father was in the Navy and my mother did mostly secretarial work.” Jake and his family moved a lot, living in Mississippi, Virginia, Illinois, California, and Germany. “I didn’t know anyone who was a scientist,” so “it didn’t seem realistic” to make that his job, though that was what he wanted to do.

At Duke University for college, Socha (pronounced “So-ha”) decided to major in physics and biology. During his senior year, he took a class on biomechanics. One of the professors (Steven Vogel) invited him to do research and the other (Stephen Wainwright, who was also a sculptor) wrote on one of his exams: “You should go to graduate school.” “It took him only a few seconds to write that and [he] changed my life.”

As he investigated graduate programs in biomechanics, which he describes as “the application of basic physics to understand how living things function,” he met Robert Dudley, a professor at the University of Texas’s department of zoology who studies flight. Dudley mentioned that no one knew much about flying snakes. That inspired Socha, whose graduate thesis at the University of Chicago would be “The Biomechanics of Flight in Snakes.”

For any object to fly, the forces on it have to allow that flight to happen. As you will see in this NASA diagram, those forces include lift, drag, and the weight of the object. Its weight pulls it down towards the center of Earth (so smaller snakes have an advantage!). Drag pushes against the motion of the object, as it meets molecules of air that were around it. And lift pushes it up.

A wing is usually shaped in a way that makes it flatter at the bottom and more curved at the top. Socha noted that flying snakes change the shape of their bodies as they fly. In less than half of a second, they move their ribs out to flatten their bellies, leaving the top of their bodies curved.

As the snakes fly, the air moves faster along the top of them than it does below them, lowering the pressure above them. This is part of what creates lift for a glider (not only a flying snake).

The other part of lift happens due to the angle at which the glider (or in this case snake) is traveling. A flat piece of paper moving horizontally through the air would not be moved up or downward. If you tilt it slightly up, it will redirect air downward as it moves, which will help move the paper upward.

There are five species in the snake genus Chrysopelea. Socha has studied three of them, including C. paradisi, which can glide up to 100 meters. For his thesis, he looked into how the snakes would take off from a tree branch and how they moved in the air.

After jumping off of a tree branch, a snake falls at a relatively sharp angle. But by quickly changing the shape of its body (forming an almost triangular cross-section by expanding its ribs, as mentioned above) and by creating waves along the length of its body, it slows the fall down. That’s how it’s able to glide.

If you’ve studied trigonometry, you probably looked at sine and cosine graphs: repeating waves. And you might have learned about “amplitude” — theheight of those waves (the distance from the middle of a wave to the top/maximum or the bottom/minimum).  Socha and his colleagues have found that the amplitude of the waves snakes form down their bodies as they glide, created by swaying their heads back and forth, plays an important role in their flight. (To learn more about the relationships between drag, lift, gliding, and trigonometry, have a look at this website.)

Why do these snakes fly? Scientists are not sure of the answer to that but Socha thinks it may be to escape danger. They also live in places like Borneo, in Southeast Asia, where trees can be far apart.

During the lockdown caused by the spread of covid-19, Socha observed many cicadas in the yard of his home and became interested in the way they “blow up” their wings each afternoon or evening. “I had cicadas flying all around me so we started studying them because we weren’t really in our lab” at the time, due to the pandemic.

Pumping blood into those wings allows cicadas to fly. But how do their wings go from being neatly folded up to a plate-like shape? “We don’t know how that happens and we don’t know what happens to the blood afterwards. I am fascinated by this question.”

Recently, Socha and some of his students were on a boat in Japan, measuring the movements of animals flying through the air above the water. Did the waves help them launch themselves? They watched flying fish and birds, but their focus was the flying squid. Using more than one camera helped them document the squids’ movements through three-dimensional space, above the waves. They took nearly 4,000 photos a week.

On a typical day, you would probably find Socha writing a grant application to fund his research or working with students and grading their papers. His favorite work is “when we’re actually doing experiments in the lab or in the field. Collecting data is the most exciting thing to do.” Then they use physics, which is “all math,” to analyze that data, “to see if the animal is doing that particular thing.” “We also use math to calculate things like position, velocity (speed), acceleration, angular rotation,” and other ways of measuring movement. Calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations are useful to the team’s work.

Do the movements of animals intrigue you, too? Socha recommends a book by his college biomechanics professor, Steven Vogel. Check out Life’s Devices: The Physical World of Animals and Plants.