Fly a Seed Model! Ride the Wind and Discover Plants’ Genius Designs (Pine, Tree of Heaven & Alsomitra)
I’m Ken Kuwako, your Science Trainer. To me, every day is an experiment!
Back in May, I spotted some Chinese Wingnut fruits at the park.
They have a very distinctive shape, with two wings attached to a single fruit. This design is actually a brilliant survival strategy.
Imagine for a moment: if you were rooted to one spot for your entire life, how would you send your children out to explore the wide world? The plants around us are constantly solving this puzzle. They are nature’s tiny inventors. While the parent plant stays grounded, they equip their seeds with incredible flight mechanisms to help them journey to new lands.
These seeds look like miniature planes or helicopters designed by a genius engineer! Today, I want to share the wisdom of these plants and show you a fun workshop where you can recreate their movements using simple materials.
Welcome to Flight School: Plant Edition!
Plants have a very practical reason for sending their seeds far away. If a seed just drops right beneath the parent tree, they’ll end up competing for the same light and nutrients. To avoid this, plants evolved a strategy called wind dispersal (anemochory), using the power of the breeze to travel. Here are our star performers:
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus): These shaped like propellers, spinning as they drift sideways.
Japanese Maple / Nikko Maple: Their wings are set at a perfect angle, allowing them to spin like helicopter rotors to stay airborne longer.
Pine: These have a thin, single wing that creates a beautiful fluttering descent.
Alsomitra: These seeds have glider-like wings that allow them to coast long distances on the wind.
Lauan: These spin rapidly downward, just like a bamboo copter toy.
When you watch their flight performances, you’ll be amazed by the beautiful designs that seem to have calculated air resistance perfectly.
At-Home Experiment: Building Your Own Flying Seed Models
The best way to understand how they fly so well is to build them yourself! By mimicking the shapes of real seeds, you’ll see just how logical nature’s designs really are.
What You’ll Need
Origami paper (any color you like!)
Scissors
Glue tape (or scotch tape)
Paper clips (used as weights)
1. Pine and Maple Seed Models
Here is a photo I took of a real pine seed.
And here is a maple seed.
Pine seeds have a tiny wing attached. Maple and Nikko Maple seeds also have unique shapes that catch the wind and spin. Check out this video to see how a real pine seed flies. → How Pine Seeds Fly
How to Fold:
- First, cut a piece of origami paper in half to make a 15cm x 7.5cm rectangle.
- Cut that rectangle further into a strip that is 7.5cm x 2.5cm.
- Fold the rectangle along the diagonal as shown in the diagram.
- Finally, fold over about 1cm at the end and secure it with a paper clip. You can see the full demonstration here! → Folding Pine and Maple Seed Models
https://youtu.be/JxwEJ5Qqq6I
2. Tree of Heaven Seed Model
Tree of Heaven seeds have thin, flat, disc-like wings. They flutter down like tiny UFOs. You can see them in action starting at the 19-second mark of this video. → How Ailanthus Seeds Fly
How to Fold:
- Cut a strip of origami paper 15cm x 1.5cm.
- Fold the strip in half and apply glue tape to the center.
- Fold both ends to meet in the middle and stick them down. Your Ailanthus model is ready!
3. Alsomitra Seed Model
Often called the flying jewels of the plant kingdom, Alsomitra seeds are shaped like high-performance gliders!
Because the seeds are incredibly light, they can glide for dozens of meters on a breeze. Watch this amazing flight here. → Alsomitra Seed Flight
You can make a very realistic Alsomitra model by folding a paper glider.
It reminds me of the Mehve glider from the Ghibli movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The most important trick here is to cut the paper into a triangle.
How to Make:
Check out this video for a detailed guide on making the origami glider. Give it a try!
Remember, the key is starting with a triangular piece of paper. Let’s uncover the secrets of these flying jewels together!
Try making these models and flying them outside. You’ll get a real sense of why they are shaped this way and how they catch the wind so effectively.
4. The Lauan Model
For a school science project, my child investigated how the fall time of Lauan (Dipterocarp) seeds changes. They were already interested in dandelion fluff, so when I showed them these winged seeds, they were hooked. Here is what they look like:
When you let go, they fly like this:
They spin just like a helicopter! We built a model of this seed using a bouncy ball and cardboard.
The real Lauan seed weighed 5.5g, and our handmade model was 6.0g—almost identical! We matched the wing length at 10.8cm.
Dropping it from a height of 5.66 meters, the model seed spun beautifully as it fell.
We timed the descent. After three drops from the same height, the results were:
1.66s, 1.31s, 1.21s (Average: 1.39s)
Next, we removed the wings and dropped it again:
1.08s, 1.24s, 1.19s (Average: 1.17s)
This clearly shows that having wings significantly increases the flight time.
We then experimented with different wing lengths: one model with double the length and one with half the length.
Double length results: 1.39s, 1.04s, 1.08s (Average: 1.17s) Half length results: 0.96s, 1.31s, 1.14s (Average: 1.13s)
In both cases, the seeds either didn’t spin at all or spun much slower than the original length. It suggests that Lauan wings have evolved to the perfect length for optimal rotation. I’m excited to see how my child puts these findings together!
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３月のイチオシ実験！
- 押し花を作ろう！：梅や桜の花の押し花を作ってみましょう。特別なケースに入れると、長く保存できて、しおりにもなります。
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- 1/27 『見えない力と遊ぼう！電気・磁石・熱の実験』（工学社）を執筆しました。
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