30 September 2011
New research on bats
During this week two interesting papers on bat biology have been published. First, McGuire et al (J. Anim. Ecol. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2011.01012.x) reports on radio tracked silver-haired bats at Long Point Bird Observatory, Ontario, Canada, Radio tagged birds were tracked using 5 towers with antennas. Most bats stopped over for 1-2 days before continuing migration, while some bats stayed for up to two weeks. Another paper, by Elemans et al (Science, Vol. 333: 1885-1888) reports about ultra-fast laryngeal muscles, which can produce echolocation calls at rates beyond 160 calls per second. Bats use such fast repetition rates during their final approach to a prey, calls known as feeding buzzes that are heard in a bat detector.
27 September 2011
New Animal FLight Lab website
The Animal Flight Lab at Lund University proudly presents its new website. We have updated the content, both when it comes to members of the lab, current projects and new publications. There have been some changes in recent time. Marco Klein Heerenbrink has started as PhD-student, and will explore aerodynamics of gliding flight further anyone else before. Sophia Engel, who has been a CAnMove funded postdoc for two years, left last Sunday for southern Germany. During her time here, Sophia has made a number of wind tunnel experiments on insects and some very extensive field experiments on flight performance in damselflies. There are now plenty of data to analyze and write up. At todays lab meeting it was decided that, in addition to the newest research papers, we will also start reading the 'classics' in the field of animal flight.
19 September 2011
Textbook about bats
It is time to activate this blog again, a semester and a new lab meetings ahead. We, the Animal Flight Lab at Lund University, will have weekly lab meetings on Tuesday mornings at 09:00, where we discuss a recent paper and other lab businesses. We look forward to a very active autumn, and we especially welcome Christoffer back from a paternal leave! It is a pleasure to note that there is a brand new edition of John Altringham's book "Bats: from evolution to conservation" (Oxford), where the flight section has been updated to include some Lund results on bat wakes. We appreciate this since the current view on bat wakes has changed quite dramatically in recent years due to those experiments, which have also been confirmed by experiments at Brown University. So, we finally made it into the textbook lore!Please also note that the lab is looking for a new PhD student (see advertisement at the links below, in Swedish and English, respectively).
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