Studying the flight of mosquitoes to draw lessons on aerodynamics

OXFORD: A new study sheds light on how mosquitoes manage to fly breaking all the norms of flapping wings, and could inspire future aerodynamic innovations, including micro-scale flying tech A mosquito caught in flight— no mean technical feat It’s the work of a team of scientists from Oxford University and the Royal Veterinary College —collaborating to try to solve one of nature’s great mysteries —how mosquitoes fly. Dr Simon Walker of Oxford’s Animal Flight Group have used eight super-high speed cameras and has shot at 10,000 frames a second — to study the insects secret. He says, “So normally to record an insect you need at least two cameras, ideally more, so you’ve got enough views of an insect because with two camera views you can then take any point on an insect and calculate its 3D co-ordinates. But because of the problems with the antennae and the legs we ended up needing to use eight cameras just to ensure that at any point in time we had enough camera views of the mosquito where we can actually see its wings clearly.” Walker, says, “So mosquitoes use three aerodynamic tricks in order to support their body weight. The first of these is a leading edge vortex which is actually used by pretty much all insects but mosquitos actually have a much lower reliance on it than other species.