A new study may inspire aeronautical engineers to be more flexible with their designs. That’s because the bends and twists in locusts’ flexible, flapping wings power the insects’ extraordinary long-distance flights, a Sept. 18 Science paper reveals.
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Even though researchers have been studying how insects and other creatures fly for a long time, “we still don’t completely understand the aerodynamics and architectures of wings,” comments Tom Daniel of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the new study. The new work, Daniel says, uncovers the flight signatures of flapping, flexible wings.
The research focuses on the flight of the pestilent locust, an insect renowned for its efficient flying style. If dragonflies are like fighter jets, then locusts are like continent-spanning 747s, says Adrian Thomas of the University of Oxford, coauthor of the new study. What locusts lack in agility, they make up for in distance: the four-winged insects are built to fly hundreds of miles at a time.
Thomas and colleagues used high-speed cameras to capture the details of how wings of the locust Schistocerca gregaria deform as they flap by bending and twisting. (A similar twist with an extended human arm would start with the thumb pointed slightly up at the top of the flap, then the arm would turn so the thumb is parallel to the ground in the middle of the flap and continue down until the thumb is pointed toward the ground at the end of the downstroke, Thomas says.)