Tag Archive | slow motion

Weekend Expedition 29: life isn’t all slo’ mo’

Well, we have been working hard for 9 days with the Photron SA-5, and this weekend was mostly busy as well. I managed to get some time out to take some photos amongst all the high speed madness. Most of these shots were taken during 6 minute downloading breaks with the camera, and I also snuck in a quick trip to the local community garden.

Culiseta incidens, probing my finger.

tanking up!

Graphocephala fenahi, the rhododendron leafhopper.

A beautiful syrphid bumblebee mimic, Eristalis flavipes.

A flower longhorn in the community garden.

A western yellowjacket delves under bark for prey.

OK, you have made it to the end of the photos. Did I ever mention that I am part American? The following 2 videos were shot at a whopping 10,000 frames per second.

High-speed Arthropod Week day 5: some nice images

Aug11

necydalis

Sorry about the delay on day 5, but I forgot my hard drive at the lab Friday night, and was right back into heavy data collection yesterday. I post these nice images of insect flight now to make it up, starting with a lovely Longhorn Beetle of the genus Necydalis. Check out the short elytra and overall wasp-like appearance!

Next up, a housefly gets a surprise!

And finally, some lovely images of a Cabbage Looper taking off.

High-speed Arthropod Week day 4: halteres

Aug9

The flies of the family Syrphidae are some of the most accomplished of all insect aeronauts. Their agility, precision and speed are amazing to see, as they dart about flowers and freeze in motionless hovering flight. Like all winged flies, syrphids have one pair of wings only, (Diptera means “two wings”). Where the rear pair would be, there is a pair of knobbed appendages called halteres. These organs function to inform the fly of perturbations in two axes, allowing precise control of direction, speed and stability.

Without halteres, all flies become unable to maintain flight control. The precise means by which sensory information from the halteres is encoded and transmitted to the fly’s brain are not fully understood, but good physical models have been developed that implicate perception of strains associated with Coriolis forces on the beating halteres (if you hold a spinning bike tire and try to perturb it in planes perpendicular to the rotation, you will feel the Coriolis forces!).

OK, so enough physics! What do beating halteres look like? Have a look at this syrphid hovering and taking off.

It might not be super obvious, but it was surprising to me to note that the plane in which the halteres move differs by an angle of up to 30 degrees from that of the wings.

Syrphids also have high power relative to their mass, and this allows very rapid accelerations (making them difficult to catch).

haltere clean

As mentioned in my other post on wing coupling, other flying insects couple their wings to achieve formidable aerial prowess. Of course, having a single pair of wings is not the only way to be a master of the skies, as dragonflies are undoubtedly one of the most agile and versatile fliers, hovering and accelerating in spectacular fashion.

Syrphids though, with their bright coloration and super high performance enabled by halteres, high power to weight ratio, and fascinating life history, are undoubtedly one of my favorite fly families.

High-speed Arthropod Week day 2: Beetle Wings!

Aug7

9042691092_dc55cd554e_c

Most large beetles, in comparison to flies, wasps and dragonflies seem slow and cumbersome in flight. Perhaps this is due to their forewings being modified into protective covers for the abdomen rather than full aerodynamic partners. Instead, many beetles hold their forewings (called elytra) aloft ahead of their membranous hindwings, contributing to stability and lift at high airspeeds only (note that they often hold them at a high dihedral, which is a stable configuration).

Certain beetles have much more agility in flight, and acheive this by closing their forewings across their abdomens after their hindwings are deployed. If you have ever tried casing down a Trichiotinus flower scarab in flight, you can appreciate their advantage!

Putting all that hindwing under the elytra takes a bit of origami. Compare the folding of the soldier beetle (Rhagonycha fulva, Cantharidae) above with the ladybird below.

Beetles are hyper-diverse, and very prominent in all kinds of ecosystems, so it seems that their (on average) less agile flight has not been a big penalty. The way that they gracefully unfold their wings and reach skyward during takeoff seems somewhat hopeful to me for some reason. And however much their flight performance lacks compared to a housefly, I still remember that almost any beetle can fly a lot better than I can!

High-speed Arthropod Week, day 1: Hamuli!

Aug6

polistes in forceps

This weekend, we began work with a new high speed camera, a Photron SA-5, with a wicked large sensor capable of recording 7500 frames per second at its full 1024 by 1024 pixel square sensor (and higher speeds at lower resolution). This beastly machine is being used by Mike Hrabar and myself to describe some little-understood phenomena around insect locomotion and behavior, which will hopefully be incorporated into a future paper. The rental of this machine is pricy, and the time when our study species is active is small, so in the downtime we have been using it for all kinds of insect imaging for fun and education. I invite you to join me this week for High-Speed Insect Science (just in case the Shark Week Fiasco has got you down).

Let us begin!

Like many insects, adult Hymenoptera have two pairs of wings on the middle and rear segments of their thorax. These wings beat in unison, and are effectively a single pair of aerodynamic surfaces. They are coupled with a tiny row of hooks (hamuli,; a single one of which is a hamulus) on the leading edge of the hindwing which grab a small fold on the trailing edge of the forewing. In the above video of Polistes dominula taking off, note how the wings beat as one unit, connected by the hamuli. For a close up view of hamuli, check out these shots by flickr user Yersinia pestis.

Sometimes the wings become uncoupled, like when the insect moves through vegetation or after a predator attack. The wings may still re-couple, as they do for this Leafcutter (Megachilid) bee during takeoff:

What is interesting to me is how the decoupled wing seems to make the Megachilid lose lift and bank to the left as it falls, something that indicates a severe aerodynamic stall on that side of the insect. The bee recovered and flew away rapidly, and it wasn’t until the video was saved that I managed to see this temporary decoupling. After the shoot, I found a nice retirement spot for this tattered-looking bee:

Large bees, such as this Bombus vosnensenskii also benefit from the large coupled wing area made possible by hamuli. This, combined with their large thoraces bursting with powerful flight muscles, allow these relative giants to power into vertical takeoffs.

These bees care not for pseudoscience!

Other insect orders also couple their wings with hamuli, such as aphids and male scale insects (Hemiptera), but moths and butterflies use a different structure called a frenulum which hooks into a fold or invagination called a retinaculum.

Hamuli are wonderfully useful structures for the lifestyle of the flying hymenopteran, but they can also be important aids to species identification, as the numbers of hooks may vary between different groups.

Well, I hope you have learned something about wing coupling in Hymenoptera, or at least enjoyed the videos. I will try to get another post ready for tomorrow, depending on what our research schedule is like. Thanks for tuning in!

PS. These are so fun! Here is a shot of a male Polistes dominula making a beautiful takeoff.

High speed imaging of jumping spider!

Aug3

Look at this beautiful Platycryptus californicus jumping spider!! She is so nice and plump! She was not always this way. When my labmate Nathan found her she was emaciated and dirty and living on the lab wall. So we fed her some blowflies!

Notice her shrunken abdomen. She is holding her legs clear of her prey while it succumbs to the venom.

Because we have fed her so well, she is now a much more attractive beast.

Anyway, today we started using a really nice high speed camera (for secret science stuff), and I needed to get the hang of working with this beastly machine. I decided a good subject would be this jumper jumping on a calliphorid fly. The videos are below. Please start the video and then immediately click the HD option and view fullscreen, as the default is kind of ugly.

So these videos are not the best in the world, as there is an annoying slowed down flickering from the incandescent light we were using (60 Hz!), but they are pretty cool anyhow. Hopefully I will do better when we get a better light source!

BTW, in both of these instances, the fly escaped. I am not even sure if the spider wanted to catch the fly, as she was already a bit stuffed. I will have to try this again with a hungrier jumper.