Doggies and rodents and bears, oh my! They all have to dry off somehow. So they shake. I know this from personal and very drippy experience (not with bears). As Andrew Dickerson and fellow video authors put it in their abstract, 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. We determine conditions for drop ejection by considering the balance of surface tension and centripetal forces on drops adhering to the animal. Particular attention is paid to rationalizing the relationship between animal size and oscillation frequency required to self-dry.
Who needs a blowdrier anymore?
This video was submitted 15 Oct 2010: http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3279v1
My favorite part of this abstract is the use of the word “hirsute.” How about hairy or furry?