Squirrel Ninja Warrior (1 Viewer)

[Optimus Prime]

Pretty cool
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If you’ve ever installed a backyard bird feeder in hopes of peacefully observing your fine feathered friends, you’re probably aware that it quickly becomes a target for your local squirrel population. Now, if anyone can stop a squirrel from breaching a bird feeder you’d assume a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer could, but as Mark Rober discovered, squirrels are the unstoppable ninjas of the animal kingdom......

Instead of just engineering a bird feeder that could effectively stop squirrels, Rober built an entire American Ninja Warrior-inspired obstacle course in his backyard for them, including everything from trap doors and mazes to even a catapult—and starting with the impossible ladder bridge challenge featured in his expose of carnival games. But Rober completely underestimated his opponents.

The squirrels made a few admirable attempts to cross the ladder bridge, but it didn’t take long for them to adapt their strategies, and simply use their athletic prowess to just skip it all together. As Rober points out, “Unless you’ve spent a lot of time trying to practice that one on your own there’s no way even the most athletic person can just step up and win that one. I think it’s telling that the parkour masters of the animal kingdom couldn’t even do it and just jumped the whole thing.”...............

Presenting: NASA Engineer vs. Nut-Stealing Backyard Squirrels

Former NASA engineer Mark Rober wanted to figure out a way to stop squirrels from targeting his bird feeders. He decided to build an American Ninja Warrior-inspired obstacle course in his backyard for them, but found that squirrels are unstoppable ninjas.

gizmodo.com

 

[Zack Lee]

That is pretty funny. I especially like the picture poses

 

[Optimus Prime]

Guess I'll put this here instead of the science thread
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Of all the things at which tree squirrels excel — burying acorns; raiding birdfeeders; gnawing on soffits — perhaps their greatest skill is leaping. And not just leaping, but stringing together risky, acrobatic jumps as they race through the arboreal canopy, pinballing from branch to branch, trunk to trunk.

“Squirrels are the epitome of excellent leapers and landers, not due to them being incredibly accurate — they’re not always accurate — but because they have all these different ways to compensate for landing errors that prevent falls,” said Nathaniel Hunt, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomechanics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Biomechanics is the study of how living things move through the world. In Hunt’s case, that means studying fox squirrels, Sciurus niger. He was the lead author of a paper in the journal Science that explored squirrel mechanics.

Hunt and his collaborators conducted three experiments. All involved convincing squirrels on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley — where he was a graduate student — to leap from Point A to Point B, while their movements were recorded on high-speed cameras. The distances ranged from two feet to five feet.

Hunt was interested in how different variables would affect the choices the squirrels made. In the first experiment, researchers varied the bendiness of the squirrels’ launching perch. This bendiness — compliance, in biomechanics-speak — approximated the flexibility of a thin branch.

Jumping from near the sturdy, trunk end of the branch would be more stable, but mean more of a distance to cover. Jumping from the far end of the branch would reduce the gap, but the bendy tip would be less stable.

In the second experiment, the launching perch was even more compliant — bendy — along its entire length. In the third experiment, the gap was widened and a wall was placed parallel to the direction of travel.

The early leaps were not always elegant. A perfect leap involved landing on the “branch” with the front paws, followed quickly by the back paws. At first, some squirrels swung over the rigid landing rod, others under. But none fell — “That was kind of surprising,” said Hunt — and after about five jumps they all had it mastered, even when launching themselves from the tippy end of the bendiest launchpad.

Not that they relished that. They squirrels preferred leaping from something steadier but farther from the target than from something bendier but closer...........

MSN

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