Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Wet-Dog Shake: How wet mammals dry themselves


The drying of wet fur is a critical to mammalian heat regulation. This fluid dynamics video demonstrates how hirsute animals rapidly oscillate their bodies to shed water droplets, nature's analogy to the spin cycle of a washing machine.

High-speed videography and fur-particle tracking is employed to determine the angular position of the animal's shoulder skin as a function of time. X-ray cinematography is used to track the motion of the skeleton. Particular attention is paid to rationalizing the relationship between animal size and oscillation frequency required to self-dry.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3279, ArXiv, 15 Oct 2010

28 comments:

  1. i dry myself like this too.is it weird?

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  2. Sweet vid, man. The X Rayed rat is one of the coolest parts.

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  3. We have all seen a dog doing it at least once in our lives and probably tried to replicate it as kids.

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  4. I definitely do it when I mob outta the shower, kinda gets water all over the bathroom though... haha

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  5. It's kind of cool to just sit back and watch some of the things animals can do. Interesting article Dex, keep em comin.

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  6. I cant stand it when my dog gets out of the bathtub and does this. Water everywhere.

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  7. never realized they did it it so fast... 27 hz is quite a lot

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  8. Too much science. I only watched for the cute liddle animals.

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  9. haha oh wow man that was great.

    I'd would never occur to me to study the frequency at which animals shake to dry themselves.

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  10. that's a cool video of that mouse

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  11. Now I know my dog doesn't just do this to annoy me

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  12. I'd like to be able to do that!

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  13. cool video, i just thought they wanted to be dry

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  14. I was not aware of such complexity to a simple fur drying.

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  15. nice video , i learned a lot from your blog :)

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  16. Hah, cool video and explanation, wish an actual science class was this interesting. Very neat.

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  17. I wonder what it would look like when humans could do this.

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  18. I do love some oscillation frequencies before bed

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  19. wow thats quite a bit of work on that vid. thanks for sharing

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  20. I wish I had a pet that did this but my cats just wipe themselves on my leg to get dry, its nice to read this sort of thing.

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