A model for snakes movement

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view Attachment view

From: Alejandra León-Castellá (leonale@racsa.co.cr)
Date: Thu Sep 05 2002 - 17:13:58 PDT 

Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2002 18:13:58 -0600
From: Alejandra León-Castellá <leonale@racsa.co.cr>
Subject: A model for snakes movement
Message-id: <3D77F346.4719E45@racsa.co.cr>

Hi pinholers!

We just finished a great science teacher conference in Costa
Rica, where Modesto Tamez was one of the speakers. It was
very successful. We hope some day in the future, some of you
decide to participate in our programs and -since you are
already here- learn a little more about our efforts on
education and conservation.

As a follow up of the conference, we visited the biggest
private reserve in the country, the Children's Eternal Rain
Forest, by the Monteverde League.

We arrived from the Caribbean side to the Pocosol Biological
Station. "Poco-sol" means "little sun", so you can imagine
it really rains there all year around.
http://www.acmonteverde.com/iestaciones2.html
We had night and day walks with expert naturalists, saw much
wildlife, learned to "appreciate" biting flies for their
contribution to the food chain in the rain forest, chased a
snake for a conference but could not catch it, visited
fumaroles and the Pocosol lagoon- probably originally a
volcanic crater- and more. It was a wonderful follow-up to
the geology summer course too, since there are so many
volcanoes in the area, active and extinct, as Pocosol is now.

Okay, enough about the experience.
My question has to do with models for the movement of the
snake. If I remember right, when we used a suspended slinky
to show the displacement of a wave, Paul showed that the
slinky really does two movements: One forward and backward
and also one of Torque.

So, my idea is that if you add both movements, they could be
a good model for the movement of the snake.

If you have other ideas about models for snake movement,
please let me know. Even though biology is one of this
countries major fields, it is still taught very
traditionally and I would like to contribute with hands on ideas.

Alejandra 

-- 
  __             http://www.cientec.or.cr
 /\_\ __     ___   __   ___        ____   ___   ___
 \/\ \\ \   /      /   /__   /| /   /    /__   /
 /\/_//_/  /___  _/_  /___  / |/   /    /___  /___ 
 \/_/            
          Tel:(506) 233-7701, Fax:(506) 255-2182
          P.O.Box 8536-1000, San José, Costa Rica

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view Attachment view

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Mon Aug 04 2003 - 16:18:06 PDT