The members of the Animal Flight Lab at Lund are gathering for the autumn term, which is filled with activities. Our Tuesday morning meetings have resumed and on the last occasion a new paper from the Brown bat flight group was discussed. This paper, by Iriarte-Diaz et al, published in PLoS One, was about "Kinematics plasticity during flight in fruit bats: Individual variability in response to loading", showed that individual bats of the same species has different ways of modulating wing shape and kinematics to achieve increased lift as a response to loaded flight. There are many ways how to achieve increased lift coefficient, such as changing flap frequency, amplitude, wing area and camber, to mention a few. The Brown paper showed that three bats used different combinations of lift enhancing modulation. The group found this paper very interesting!
We will continue to publish updates about lab activities at this site, so stay tuned and you will receive interesting news coming soon, such as reports from field work that starts next week.
