Article Review: Jumping with adhesion: landing surface incline alters impact force and body kinematics in crested geckos

The article I chose looks at the mechanics of jumping and adhesion in crested geckos.  The research looks into body position of crested geckos as they jump and if their body position changes depending on the angle of the surface they are jumping onto and if it causes impact force to vary.  This work is interesting because it helps us to better understand the behavior of geckos and if geckos vary their body position to reduce impact.  It was found that crested geckos use only one body position and do not change it based on angle variation of their jumps.  The part of their body that touches the surface first though varies based on the angle.  For example, the belly touches the surface first when jumping to a horizontal surface.  It was also found that crested geckos lift their tails up when they jump.  However, they only used crested geckos with tails in this experiment and crested geckos do not grow their tails back when they lose them.  The article states that they believe this would change body position but they did not study it.  The authors of this article are: Timothy E. Higham, Mara N. S. Hofmann, Michelle Modert, Marc Thielen & Thomas Speck.  The article was published in Scientific Reports vol. 11.  

Link to article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02033-4

I was especially interested in this article because I have a crested gecko named Scramble.  Scramble is about 8 years old and when I adopted him he did not have a tail.  I decided to record him to see how his horizontal jump looked after reading this article.  The video quality is not very good, but you can see he has almost the same body angle as the geckos in Figure 4 from the article.  His back appears to be arched slightly more and his head angled up more than the geckos with tails though.  It is difficult to tell for sure though because of the poor camera quality.  I think it would be really interesting for a follow-up study to be done on tailless crested geckos!