A speck-sized beetle overturns assumptions about flight mechanics.
When it comes to insect flight, bigger is usually better. As wings shrink, air friction overwhelms flight power—that’s why dragonflies soar as houseflies sputter. But a beetle the size of a grain of sand flips this maxim on its head.
As the name suggests, featherwing beetles sport bristled, featherlike wings. These porous appendages are light and produce less friction than the typical membrane-based wings that flies have, helping the beetle generate lift. Multiple insect lineages, including parasitic wasps, have evolved similar wings as they downsized—but these beetles use a previously unknown strategy to generate their outsized flight prowess, according to the new study’s authors.
The team found that instead of flapping their wings up and down, featherwing beetles loop them in a “remarkable” figure-eight pattern, says study co-author Dmitry Kolomenskiy, a physicist studying fluid mechanics at Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology.
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