Video: The Physics of How a Wet Dog Shakes

"Many furry mammals engage in oscillatory shaking when wet." Translation: When a dog comes in from the rain, it engages in a body-twisting, jowl-flapping shake that sprays water over the living room. But exactly what kinds of oscillations are required to make the water droplets scatter? Thankfully a team of curious researchers decided to study the physics of that motion. In the abstract posted on ArXiv, Andrew Dickerson of the Georgia Institute of Technology and some colleagues explain that they attacked the question via high-speed video and fur-particle tracking: As you can see from the data in the video, the research raises further questions. Their mathemathical model is based on the idea that surface tension holds the water droplets to the animal's hair, and that centripetal forces from the shaking have to exceed that surface tension in order to free the water. This implies that smaller animals (or as they might say, animals with a smaller radius) have to shake faster in order to get dry, a prediction borne out by observations of everything from mice to bears. But when the researchers plotted the data on a graph, it didn't quite conform to their predictions. Technology Review, where we first saw this story, explains where they may have gone wrong: