The researchers also believe-though they've been unable to prove-that rattlesnakes shake not by shortening the muscles on the side of the tail toward which the rattle is moving, as one might expect, but by using their muscles as a brake. They found two reasons for this: First, the muscles produce little force second, they don't rely exclusively on oxygen for fuel. The rattlesnake combines the speed of a sprinter with the endurance of a marathoner."īy placing western diamondback rattlesnakes into a magnetic resonance scanner, Conley and his collaborators, comparative physiologist Stan Lindstedt of Northern Arizona University and his graduate student Paul Schaeffer, discovered that the snakes require surprisingly little energy per shake. "Human muscles can do one of those things, but not both at the same time. "The rattling is extraordinarily fast and can be sustained for a prolonged time," says Kevin Conley, a zoologist and radiologist at the University of Washington. What scientists could not understand, for a long time, was how the reptile can rattle so vigorously for, in some cases, hours. By studying how rattlesnakes are able to use their muscles so quickly and at a low cost of energy per shake, the researchers are developing new exercise techniques that may allow frail and elderly people to better avoid injury, enable patients in rehab to heal faster, and perhaps even make it possible for some people a lot shorter than basketball players to pull off those gravity-defying dunks.Ī rattlesnake rattle is made of dead tissue and its owner shakes it by twitching sets of small muscles on either side of its tail. But that's exactly what some scientists are doing.
RATTLE SNAKE BATTLE SNAKE HOW TO
You wouldn't think to look to a cold-blooded creature for lessons on how to help pro athletes and others perform better. A pro basketball player sprinting to a breakaway dunk can't manage such muscle movements more than 8 times a second-almost ponderous, by comparison. When a rattler shakes its tail on a hot day, its muscles are lengthening and shortening as many as 90 times per second-twice as fast as the wing muscles of a hummingbird sipping nectar. (Good thing.) Rather, it's their trademark noisemaker that qualifies them as the swiftest movers and shakers among terrestrial vertebrates. True, the reptiles don't cover ground all that fast.
Slow? Not to our eyes, maybe, but even the bird's supercharged wingbeats are on the sluggish side compared to the moves of a true champion, the rattlesnake. PITY THE POOR hummingbird-so small, so slight, so slow. Rattlesnakes can vibrate their rattles at phenomenal speeds for hours at a time do their muscles hold secrets that could help humans better perform exercises?
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