[HN Gopher] Novel flight style and light wings boost flight perf...
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       Novel flight style and light wings boost flight performance of tiny
       beetles
        
       Author : wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2022-01-22 11:13 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | bfdm wrote:
       | It would be really helpful to see an animated model of the wing
       | stroke. It's rather difficult to visualize for someone (like me)
       | unfamiliar with the language of this specialty.
        
         | narag wrote:
         | I'm lazy. I'll wait for this guy's video.
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/c/AntLab
        
           | ncmncm wrote:
           | These beetles are smaller than the eyes of most of the bugs
           | in that vid. He would need better equipment to get these.
        
             | narag wrote:
             | Some of the videos are impressive. This guys are really
             | small and filmed at very high velocity:
             | 
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXeSnWY6DNc
        
         | plafl wrote:
         | There are several videos at the end of the article under
         | section Supplementary Information, for example:
         | 
         | https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
        
       | ncmncm wrote:
       | This is outstanding work!
       | 
       | The tl;dr: is that the wing made of bristles provides 68% of the
       | lift of a membrane wing, yet masses only a fifth as much, so they
       | don't need to store and recover elastic energy, like most
       | beetles, to fly 3x as fast as their size would suggest.
       | 
       | I found a swarm of almost invisibly tiny thrips settled on a
       | surface in my backyard, years back, and was duly amazed, but
       | these are much smaller! Notice the pic in the article comparing
       | the whole beetle to a single-celled amoeba.
       | 
       | They note the wing mass of 0.013 micrograms, less than a fifth
       | what a membranous wing would mass. In the methods section, they
       | reveal they got this mass by adding up how much the measured
       | volume of chitin must weigh. Actually weighing something 0.013 ug
       | would be very hard. Imagine collecting the wings of 38,000
       | beetles to get up to a milligram so you could weigh them!
       | 
       | This beetle innovates vs other bristle-winged insects by having
       | bristles on the bristles, improving their effectiveness. The
       | bristle is very tiny. Can the finer detail really be made of
       | separate cells? Or are they sculpted of raw chitin by the cells
       | making up the bristle?
        
       | telesilla wrote:
       | Robobees look pretty encouraging: https://youtu.be/hEZ7rHRifVc
        
       | pomian wrote:
       | This is mind blowing. It is very well written, and easy to
       | understand. Another very cool use of scanning electron
       | microscopy, and computational fluid dynamics. "Our experiment
       | combines three-dimensional reconstructions of morphology and
       | kinematics in one of the smallest insects, the beetle Paratuposa
       | placentis (body length 395 mm)." Check out the size of the
       | beetle!
       | 
       | Another interesting thing to ponder is how flight is
       | achieved/controlled, at such small scale. This goes far beyond
       | the standard discussions between lift and thrust. "Compared with
       | larger sizes, flight at small sizes is dominated by viscous air
       | friction rather than inertial forces resulting from the
       | acceleration of the surrounding air. This competition between
       | friction and inertia is key for flight at all size scales and
       | thus applies to all animals that move through air."
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-23 23:01 UTC)