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 species) is caused by inadvertent, repeated collisions with vegetation during flight, suggesting the possibility that insect wings may di...

Exaggerated male ornaments are predicted to be costly to their bearers, but these negative effects may be offset by the correlated evolution of compensatory traits. However, when locomotor systems, such as wings in flying species, evolve to decrease such costs, it remains unclear whether functional changes across related species are achieved via the same morphological route or via alternate cha...

Hummingbirds (Trochilidae) are widely known for their insect-like flight strokes characterized by high wing beat frequency, small muscle strains and a highly supinated wing orientation during upstroke that allows for lift production in both halves of the stroke cycle. Here, we show that hummingbirds achieve these functional traits within the limits imposed by a vertebrate endoskeleton and muscl...

Attractor merging can exist in chaotic systems with some kind of symmetry, which makes it possible to form a four-wing attractor from a bistable system. A relatively simple such case is described, which has robust chaos varying from a pair of coexisting symmetric single-wing attractors to a double-wing butterfly attractor, and finally to a four-wing attractor. Basic dynamical characteristics of...

The present paper addresses the aeroelastic optimization of a membrane wing. Aerodynamic optimization of a deforming wing has been done in recent work by Walker, Patil, and Canfield. The deformation shapes required for maximum thrust and thrust efficiency were calculated. In the present work, the maximum thrust for the membrane wing is calculated by optimizing the tension in the membrane so tha...

Butterfly wing patterns are key adaptations that are controlled by remarkable developmental and genetic mechanisms that facilitate rapid evolutionary change. With swift advancements in the fields of genomics and genetic manipulations, identifying the regulators of wing development and mimetic wing patterns has become feasible even in nonmodel organisms such as butterflies. Recent mapping and ge...

Spinning-wing decoys are strong attractants to ducks and increase kill rates over traditional decoying methods. However, it is unknown whether all duck species are attracted similarly to spinning-wing decoys and whether the effectiveness of these decoys changes with latitude. We examined the effectiveness of spinning-wing decoys for 9 species of dabbling ducks during 545 experimental hunts in C...

Rhinolophus euryale and R. mehelyi are morphologically very similar species and their distributions overlap extensively in the Mediterranean basin. We modelled their foraging behaviour using echolocation calls and wing morphology and, assuming niche segregation occurs between the two species, we explored how it is shaped by these factors. Resting frequency of echolocation calls was recorded and...

Complex behaviors of flying insects require interactions among sensory-neural systems, wing actuation biomechanics, and flapping-wing aerodynamics. Here, we review our recent progress in understanding these layers for maneuvering and stabilization flight of fruit flies. Our approach combines kinematic data from flying insects and aerodynamic simulations to distill reduced-order mathematical mod...