YouTuber Allen Pan is a big snake fan. With a curious experiment, he has now enabled a specimen to walk on robotic legs.
San Francisco – 150 million ago, most species of snakes walked the prehistoric world on legs. Then, as in so many cases, evolutionary development threw a spanner in the works. In the meantime, we humans can hardly imagine snakes in any other way than with their characteristic – as the name suggests – snake movements. The YouTuber Allen Pan has therefore set himself the task of letting a snake walk on its legs and has documented his experiment on video.
“Snake Fan” Allen Pan lets snake walk on robotic legs
Even today, it can still be seen in snake embryos that body growth initially goes hand in hand with the growth of limbs. But even before they are born, the body changes into the typical snake shape. After all, evolution probably didn’t consider it necessary to permanently bless snakes with legs. exceptions like that Gray shark, which has changed little genetically for 150 million and is therefore called a living fossilare rather rare in the animal world.
Allen Pan, with around two million followers on YouTube, is, as he says himself, a big “snake fan”. Although a creature’s genetic mutation that is responsible for the evolutionary change is likely to have a deeper purpose – such as hunting advantages over previous conspecifics – Pan feels bad for the snakes’ leg loss.
YouTuber wants to give snake robotic legs
That’s why he wants to enable at least one copy of exactly this ability. For this he has developed extra robotic legs that are precisely tailored to the snake. To do this, he has contacted a snake breeder with 11 years of experience to help him with his plan and to ensure that the animal does not suffer physically or psychologically from the experiment. Because before that he had repeatedly received criticism that your experiments were not animal-friendly, even if he insists that no animal with damage has left his video.
In this case, it even provides proof of animal welfare. In order for the snake to go into the robot legs, it has to stretch out. In snake-speak, that means to be relaxed. Once the snake felt stress, it would curl up and no longer be suitable for the experiment.
YouTouber wants to equip snake with robotic legs – and she is willing to participate
Pan developed the robotic legs himself. To do this, he used reptiles with legs as a guide, in order to make the snake’s gait as comfortable as possible. His construct consists of four robotic legs attached to a transparent plastic tube.
Together with the snake breeder Anthony he starts the experiment. They slowly lead the snake to the pipe. The first time she decides against threading her way through the pipe. But on the second attempt, the snake seems to decide in favor of it – and without any help from the two people.
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Then Pan starts the walking process. Although the snake could leave the tube at any time, since it is not fixed to it, the snake obviously quickly finds its liking in its walker. Pan jokes that he “corrected 150 million years of evolutionary errors” with his experiment.
His followers on the web celebrate the experiment. A user writes: “This is the best thing I’ve ever seen”. Others comment: “I never thought so, but the snake seems to really love its robotic legs” or “If ever aliens do weird things to us, remember that”. And one says: “Now all that’s missing is a device so that the snake can decide for itself where it wants to go”.
A 26-year-old from southern Germany is also very familiar with reptiles – including snakes. He is one of the largest insect breeders in Europe.
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