The wonder of animal movement – from the tiniest of insects to the largest fish in the sea – has been a subject of mystery for ages. But when it comes to animal propulsion, there are almost infinite kinds, but also limits that can’t be pushed or breakdowns will occur, according to an unusual study from a team that includes a Texas A&M University at Galveston researcher. 
 
 Nathan Johnson, a graduate student at Texas A&M-Galveston who also teaches in the marine biology department, and colleagues from Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Providence College, Indiana University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute have studied the complex ways animal movements have evolved over millions of years and through hundreds of species. Their findings have been published in the current issue of Nature Communications. 
 
 The team narrowed animal subjects down to 59 species for the study, and concentrated on ways each one is able to propel itself – through air, land or water. 
 
 The key word appears to be “bend.” One common trait they found was each creature being able to “bend” its means of propulsion, but only to a certain point. 
 
 “If you take the wing of a bird or a bat, or the fins on a fish or a manta ray, you find that their means of propulsion are flexible,” Johnson explains. “They can move back or forth or sideways easily, or they bend. But this bending and flexibility will only go so far, and it can’t bend any more. 
 
 “For example, the fixed wing on an airplane is not flexible, while nature has had millions of years to figure out the best way to do it better than we can. So we wanted to see if there any patterns to this flexibility. 
 
 “For most creatures, there is a certain angle that these propulsion devices will reach and won’t exceed. It’s not that they probably can’t exceed these angles, but rather doing so is just not energetically efficient for them.. 
 
 “There does seem to be a universal range of movement in the species we looked at, from the fruit fly to the humpback whale.” 
 
 The team found that a 30 to 60-degree angle seems to be the magic range of how far animal propulsion can bend. “This appears to be especially true with bird wings, while insect wings typically bend slightly less than other organisms we looked at,” Johnson adds. 
 
 Also, the researchers agreed that environmental factors could be a factor in the range of movement. And some species move almost identically to vastly different species; they found that much of the motion made by marine life is almost identical to that of birds – that is, the fin of a fish moves just like the wing of a bird. 
 
 “We need to understand a lot of these motion patterns in much more detail,” Johnson says. 
 
 “There are some current day tests being done with man-made materials to see if they can duplicate animal motion, such as some being done with jellyfish. The more we learn about animal propulsion and the way it’s been developed over millions of years of evolution, the more it can help us with human engineering and how we can improve our own movement.” 
 
 The project was funded by the National Science Foundation. 
 
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 Media contact: Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644 or Nathan Johnson ||||| Once they sense danger, fruit flies can pitch their bodies like a fighter jet during flight, rolling almost upside down in order to shift momentum and speed to avoid a oncoming threat, new research shows. 
 
 “We discovered that fruit flies alter course in less than one one-hundredth of a second, 50 times faster than we blink our eyes, which is faster than we ever imagined.” Michael Dickinson, UW professor of biology and co-author of the paper about these findings, said in a news release. 
 
 In his lab, Dickinson and other researchers have found that evasive maneuvers performed by fruit flies, also known as Drosophila hydei, are very similar to those of a fighter jet. His research will be published in the April 11 issue of Science. 
 
 Escape Maneuver in a Flying Fly from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
 
 More like a plane than a boat 
 
 “One of the fastest things a fruit fly does is take information from its eyes and react accordingly,” Dickinson said. 
 
 Previous research suggested that flies would turn like a boat would, Dickinson said, but this new research has shown that they can pitch their body and perform banked turns much like a plane would. 
 
 “They do this with remarkably subtle changes in wing movement,” Dickinson told us. 
 
 Florian Muijres, lead author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher, said that it’s both the speed and accuracy of the flies that they have found impressive. 
 
 “What we have found is that these flies are fast and accurate in their response,” Muijres said. 
 
 According to Muijres, the flies can roll almost completely upside down while flying thanks to the incredible speed at which they flap their wings. 
 
 “These flies normally flap their wings 200 times a second and, in almost a single wing beat, the animal can reorient its body to generate a force away from the threatening stimulus and then continues to accelerate,” Muijres said in the UW release. 
 
 The fly’s brain may be small, but it’s very dense with neurons. Muijres said a fly’s brain is actually more dense than a human brain. The mystery of how these little creatures are able to perform such amazing feats is still pushing the researchers at UW forward with their research. 
 
 “We have the input and the output and now we are looking at how the input translates into the output,” Muijres said. 
 
 Using tech to slow down time 
 
 UW researchers used three high speed cameras to accurately capture the flies’ movements in a 20-by-20 centimeter flight arena. They used an expanding shadow effect to make the fly take evasive action, and the cameras recorded the action at 7,500 frames per second. 
 
 Escape Maneuver Fly SetupNrobofly from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
 
 Because the camera shutters were opening and closing every one thirty-thousandth of a second, they need to light the flight arena so the cameras would be able to get the footage. Dickinson said they used infra-red light in order to light the space for the cameras without blinding the flies in the process. 
 
 “When the flies would go through the focus of all three cameras is when we would start recording,” Dickinson said. 
 
 Once the measurements and video were recorded, the scientists were able to replicate the fly’s movement on a robot fly model. 
 
 “We are able to take the measurements and replay them on the robot and directly measure the forces the wings were generating,” Dickinson said. 
 
 Amazing brains 
 
 Dickinson said a fruit fly’s brain performs very complicated calculations in a split second, an amazing level of calculation for something so small. 
 
 “How can such a small brain generate so many remarkable behaviors? A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse. That’s a super interesting problem from an engineering perspective,” Dickinson said in a news release. 
 
 Check out some more videos of the fruit fly in action: 
 
 Escape Maneuver FlyModel from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
 
 Escape Maneuver Fly Topview from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
 
 Escape Maneuver in Fly #2 from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo. 
 
 Break out your 3D glasses for this one: 
 
 Escape Maneuver FlyModel 3D from Michael Dickinson on Vimeo.
– When it comes to movement, human engineering has much to learn from Mother Nature, says a new study in Nature Communications. Researchers found that animals of all kinds use the same essential mechanics to move whether on land, air, or water, reports the Houston Chronicle, which likens it to a "magic formula." In other words, "the fin of a fish moves just like the wing of a bird," explains Texas A&M's Tamu Times. And it's no accident: "The best reason we can think that these similarities are there in nature is that they are the most energy efficient," says an A&M researcher. The team looked at everything from insects to birds to whales to fish to molluscs, and found that the secret is in their flexible wings, fins, and tails. It's all about the bend, which always falls into a range of 30% to 60%. It's not that they can't bend further, it's that it doesn't make aerodynamic sense. Compared with how we get around on our man-made contraptions, animals show "a potentially perfect universal design," the Chronicle notes—and scientists hope they can steal some wisdom to help technology catch up. Maybe someday, then, fixed-wing aircraft will be replaced by planes with bendable wings. (Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, researchers found that your dog really does know when you're happy.)