Prestigious postdoc to Florian Muijres

We are very happy that animal flight lab member Florian Muijres receievd 2-year postdoc from VR (The Swedish Research Council). These postdocs are awarded in severe competition and allows the recipient to spend 2 years abroad. Florian will now go to the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, where he will work in Michael Dickinson's lab. We wish all the well for Florian's postdoctoral stay, but we also hope there is a chance that we will see him again in Lund, as these postdocs usually come with a return-funding. But now we look forward to see what interesting questions Florian will investigate in the big country to the left of the Atlantic. Congratulations, and all the best of luck!

New birds to the wind tunnel

During the weekend two new birds, Diamond doves, moved in to the wind tunnel aviary. The hope is that they will learn to fly in the wind tunnel and that we will be able to find something interesting out from these flights. These are small doves living in arid habitats of Australia in the wild, while they have become popular pet-animals because they easily reproduce in captivity. Hopefully these pigeons will be flying in the wind tunnel soon, and allow us to study the wing-beat kinematics, the wake of flapping and maybe also gliding flight. Stay tuned and you will soon hear more about this!

Hovering in a whiteye

A research team based in Taiwan has published a new PIV-study on the hovering aerodynamics in hovering Zosterops japonicus, which birdwatchers know as whiteyes. These 6-7 g birds are capable of hovering, i.e. flying at zero forward speed, which was studied in a special hovering chamber. Wing kinematics and induced vortex flows were monitored, which uncovered a new mechanism for enhancing lift force in hovering in birds - a ventral clap-and-fling. This mechanism is known from some insects already since the dane Torkel Weis-Fogh's pioneering work, but had not been observed in birds before. Interestingly some of the high-lift mechanism previously known from insect flight are now being observed in birds and bats, mainly due to the application of the PIV-technique to animal flight. We, the Lund crew, are happy to see this approach spreading to other labs studying animal flight. The paper can be found in Experiments in Fluids.

Migration Ecology Course for PhD students

The biannual course in migration ecology at Lund University started yesterday. After an introduction the students give short, 15 min, presentations about their projects during the first two days. Then, the first lecture day starts as usual with locomotion. This years line-up is Colin Pennycuick, Anders Hedenström, Florian Muijres and Christoffer Johansson. As before we focus on animal flight and swimming. There is also an exercise involving the measurement of aerodynamic morphology and using it to calculate various performance measures using Colin Pennycuick's progrom Flight. This course is a great experience for both students and lecturers. For more information about the program have a look at www.canmove.se.

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.

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.

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).

http://www.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=22598&Dnr=419462&Type=S

http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=24914&Dnr=419462&Type=EU