(11.2) And what better way to celebrate Bat Week than with this image of a bat wake taken over at Brown University’s Breuer Lab, part of the Aeromechanics and Evolutionary Morphology Lab.
Somewhere in the BioMed Building an eclectic team of undergrads, grad students, post-docs, and visiting scientists are flying bats through wind tunnels and watching them flap around in poorly lit rooms hoping to learn more about the mechanistic basis of flight in bats. Professors Kenny Breuer (Engineering) and Sharon Swartz (Ecology an Evolutionary Biology) have joined disciplines to create the Bat Flight Research Program. (The program has its own YouTube channel).
The aerodynamics of flexible, articulated wings is extremely complex and poorly understood, and our team is studying their characteristics using high-speed measurements of the bat’s wing and body motion. These kinematic measurements are synchronized with Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) measurements of the fluid velocity in the wake behind the animal and, together, the kinematic and fluid measurements will shed light on the lift and thrust mechanisms that bats use during straight flight as well as maneuvers.
The two bat species native to Rhode Island are the Large Brown Bat and the Little Brown Bat. Perhaps Brown University should rethink its mascot.
(Without bats we wouldn’t have bananas. Also, one little brown bat can eat 1000 mosquito-sized insects in one night. Why not build a bat house?)
Bat Week runs from October 26th to November 2nd.