Sandfish lizard swimming in desert sand as a snake in water

From the paper Ryan D. Maladen, Yang Ding, Chen Li, Daniel I. Goldman, "Undulatory Swimming in Sand: Subsurface Locomotion of the Sandfish Lizard," Science Vol. 325. no. 5938, pp. 314 - 318, 17 July 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.117...

"The sandfish lizard uses its limbs to run on the surface and rapidly bury into the interior of granular media. Within the granular medium, the sandfish lizard executes undulatory locomotion; limbs are held against the body. Within the granular medium, opaque markers clearly show that the limbs of the sandfish are held close to the body during swimming. The square frame in the movie is a thin above ground barrier that forces the animal to dive into the material at a consistent location and appears faintly as an artifact from the background subtraction. The tracked points and colored bars that appear at the end of the video indicate the inter-limb distance."

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• biology
• locomotion
• lizard

[ydingzh]

@2toxicity They are limited by the container. But I don't think they can go very far at a time either.

[ydingzh]

@AvengedTimes You are right, it swims more like a nematode than a fish.

[MurdocLC]

Not really like water... and does it just stay there?

[oreowithmilk1]

@2toxicity nope i have them as pets and ive seen them go to about 5 inches down in the sand

[2toxicity]

Can they move farther than that or is that just about as far as they go?

[MartyZANCO]

theyre cute^^

[benbennit]

sandfish beasty from tremors.