Hawkmoths and other insects are slow fliers compared to birds, even ones that can hover. To understand why these insects top out at 5 m/s, researchers simulated their flight from Keep reading
Tag: insect flight
Moths and Beetles in Flight
Watching insects take flight in high-speed video is always mesmerizing. So often their wings look too small and fragile to lift their bulbous bodies, but they manage the feat easily. Keep reading
Featherwings in Flight
The featherwing beetle is tiny, less than half a millimeter in length. At that scale, flying is a challenge, with air’s viscosity dominating the forces the insect must overcome. The Keep reading
Butterflies Emerging
When a butterfly emerges from its chrysalis, it flaps its wings to help pump fluids through its body, essentially inflating its new adult form. You get a glimpse of that Keep reading
Insects Taking Flight
As awkward as they look sometimes, insects are amazing fliers. In this video from Ant Lab, we see all kinds of insects taking flight. Some, like the mantis, execute flying Keep reading
Moths in Flight
As student engineers, we often use fixed-wing aircraft to build our intuition for flight, but nature has so many other incredible examples to offer. Here we see high-speed video of Keep reading
Unusual Insects Taking Off
What do you do when you’re an insect researcher with a high-speed camera? Why, film all sorts of unusual insects from your backyard as they take off and fly! Here Keep reading
Insect-Inspired Flight
Insects are incredibly agile and resilient fliers, capable of colliding and recovering without damage. Engineers are only beginning to capture these characteristics in their robots. Here, engineers use a soft Keep reading
Flexible Wings Aid Butterfly Flight
Butterflies are some of the oddest flyers of the insect world, given the large size of their wings relative to their bodies. That could be a recipe for inefficient flight, Keep reading
Flying Through Waterfalls
Swifts and starlings often make their nests behind waterfalls. To explore how these birds traverse their watery curtain, researchers observed hummingbirds, a smaller sister species, flying through an artificial waterfall. Keep reading