The secret of how cats twist in mid-air to land on their feet
The secret of how cats twist in mid-air to land on their feet
The secret of how cats twist in mid-air to land on their feet
An exceptionally flexible region of the spine enables falling cats to twist the front and back halves of their body sequentially to ensure a safe landing.
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Cats famously always land on their feet. If you hold a cat upside down and drop it, the animal will quickly wriggle in mid-air and land confidently on its feet.
Quite how cats achieve this has been challenging scientists for over 100 years.
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[Now a new study found that] they have a secret trick: a region of their spine that is exceptional at twisting.
“We compared the flexibility of the thoracic spine and lumbar spine in cats, and we found that the thoracic spine is very flexible,” says Yasuo Higurashi at Yamaguchi University in Japan.
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The study also threw up a strange detail. Both of the live cats rotated to the right as they fell: one did so every time, the other in six out of eight trials. Gbur says an audience member at one of his talks noticed that the cats in his videos also seemed to turn to the right. “It looks like, at least anecdotally, cats seem to have a rough preference for which way they twist,” he says. It’s not clear why; it may be that asymmetries in the placement of cats’ internal organs mean it’s easier to turn one way than the other.
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