... the development and scaling of body parts remains unclear. In bees, a reduction in body size and/or a reduction in body parts, such as the antennae, tongue and wings, and how they scale with body size (i.e. their allometry) could severely affect their fitness. To date, it remains unclear how temperature affects...

...Andrew M. Mountcastle; Stacey A. Combes The wings of many insects accumulate considerable wear and tear during their lifespan, and this irreversible structural damage can impose significant costs on insect flight performance and survivability. Wing wear in foraging bumblebees (and likely many other...

...Kristen E. Crandell; Bret W. Tobalske SUMMARY During slow flight, bird species vary in their upstroke kinematics using either a ‘flexed wing’ or a distally supinated ‘tip-reversal’ upstroke. Two hypotheses have been presented concerning the function of the tip-reversal upstroke. The first...

...-off for these insects to adopt hydrophobic technologies, especially on contacting surfaces such as legs and wings. The cranefly is a weak flier, with many species typically found in wet/moist environments where they lay eggs. Water droplets placed on this insect's wings will spontaneously roll off...

...David Lentink; Michael H. Dickinson SUMMARY Organisms that swim or fly with fins or wings physically interact with the surrounding water and air. The interactions are governed by the morphology and kinematics of the locomotory system that form boundary conditions to the Navier–Stokes (NS) equations...

...David Lentink; Michael H. Dickinson SUMMARY The aerodynamic performance of hovering insects is largely explained by the presence of a stably attached leading edge vortex (LEV) on top of their wings. Although LEVs have been visualized on real, physically modeled, and simulated insects, the physical...

... in wing kinematics and aerodynamics across flight speeds are gradual. Take-off flight performance scales with body size, but fully revealing the mechanisms responsible for this pattern awaits new study. Intermittent flight appears to reduce the power cost for flight, as some species flap–glide at slow...

...F. Song; K. L. Lee; A. K. Soh; F. Zhu; Y. L. Bai SUMMARY Detailed investigations on the structural and mechanical properties of the forewing of the cicada were carried out. Measurement of the structures of the wings showed that the thickness of the membrane of each cell and the diameter of each...

...Keri L. Page; Thomas Matheson SUMMARY The anatomy and physiology of exteroceptors on the surfaces of the wings have been described in many insects, but their roles in behaviour have been less well studied. They have often been assumed to have a role primarily in flight. We show that the wings...

...James R. Usherwood; Tyson L. Hedrick; Andrew A. Biewener SUMMARY Direct pressure measurements using electronic differential pressure transducers along bird wings provide insight into the aerodynamics of these dynamically varying aerofoils. Acceleration-compensated pressures were measured at five...

...S. A. Combes; T. L. Daniel SUMMARY During flight, many insect wings undergo dramatic deformations that are controlled largely by the architecture of the wing. The pattern of supporting veins in wings varies widely among insect orders and families, but the functional significance of phylogenetic...

...James R. Usherwood; Charles P. Ellington SUMMARY High force coefficients, similar to those observed for revolving model hawkmoth wings in the accompanying paper (for which steady leading-edge vortices are directly observed), are apparent for revolving model (mayfly,bumblebee and quail) and real...

...Mao Sun; Jian Tang SUMMARY A computational fluid-dynamic analysis was conducted to study the unsteady aerodynamics of a model fruit fly wing. The wing performs an idealized flapping motion that emulates the wing motion of a fruit fly in normal hovering flight. The Navier–Stokes equations are solved...

...R. J. Wootton; K. E. Evans; R. Herbert; C. W. Smith ABSTRACT Detailed morphological investigation, mechanical testing and high-speed cinematography and stroboscopic examination of desert locusts, Schistocerca gregaria , in flight show that their hind wings are adapted to deform cyclically...

...C. W. Smith; R. Herbert; R. J. Wootton; K. E. Evans ABSTRACT As part of an investigation of the functional mechanics of the hind wing of the desert locust Schistocerca gregaria , the Young’s modulus of the membrane was measured using a newly developed universal materials test machine capable...

... anemometry, high-speed videography and flow visualization to study air flow near the feathery olfactory antennae of male silkworm moths ( Bombyx mori L.). When exposed to conspecific female sex pheromone, male B. mori flap their wings through a stroke angle of 90–110 ° at approximately 40 Hz without flying...

... for walking in air are effectively point-loaded, and their rigid components need to resist axial forces as well as bending and torsional moments. Aquatic walking limbs have little axial loading, while swimming appendages and wings experience only bending and torsional moments, and can exploit these to assist...

... pattern circulate hemolymph in the developing wings and legs. This hypothesis was tested in the present study by making simultaneous electromyographic recordings of APRM activity and contact thermographic recordings of hemolymph flow in pupal wings. APRM contractions and hemolymph flow were strictly...

...Masato Okamoto; Kunio Yasuda; Akira Azuma ABSTRACT The aerodynamic characteristics of the wings and body of a dragonfly and of artificial wing models were studied by conducting two types of wind-tunnel tests and a number of free-flight tests of gliders made using dragonfly wings. The results were...

...Sean J. Kirkpatrick ABSTRACT The effects of scale on the estimated stresses and safety factors in the humeri of several bird and bat species were investigated. This was accomplished by estimating the lift distribution across the wings at two extremes of flight, gliding flight and the downstroke...