300 million years ago, before birds, bats, and even pterodactyls
insects were flying. They were the first animals to lift themselves into the air
and they're still the most successful flyers on earth.
i've been putting a bunch of insects on this little platform here and filming
how they get themselves up into the air and off into their
flights. I haven't really been doing this for any research purposes,
i've just been trying to find the most interesting insects I could and film
them in a way that I don't think anybody else has.
So, I collected most of the insects in this video by setting up a black light.
A lot of night-active, flying insects will come to these lights.
And from this i've been able to collect and film insects from over seven
different orders. This is the filming set, set up in my
laundry room. Each of the clips you'll see in this video were filmed here
at a rate of 3200 frames per second. I specifically avoided filming any
insects you might have seen flight footage of before.
So in this video there're no butterflies, there're no bees,
there's not even a fly. I only went after the weird stuff.
Like here: this was my half successful attempt at getting a plume moth to fly
on camera. I couldn't get it to fly in-frame
without prodding it with a paintbrush.
These are really unique moths and I love how it just seems to barely be able to
lift itself into the air. And look at its feather like hind wings!
I'm gonna have to keep trying to film those moths. They deserve their own video.
Okay, so let's start with an iconic summertime insect.
One you've probably seen flying before, but definitely not like this.
This is the common eastern firefly or lightning bug. Like most beetles getting
ready to fly, the first step is lifting the hardened,
protective fore wings that are called
elytra. One interesting thing that this footage
shows is that the elytra flap during flight too.
In getting off the ground, the middle legs are just barely out of the path of
the wings as they flap nearly 180 degrees around
the body. The wings actually brush up against each
other at the top and bottom of the stroke.
In these scenes the beetles are beating their wings at a frequency of about 62
full up and down strokes per second.
This is a painted lichen moth, two flight sequences of the same
individual, superimposed.
This might be my new favorite piece of insect footage. The lighting and the slow-
motion make it almost unreal, like it's animated or made out of clay
or something.
One of the things I love in this sequence is seeing how flexible the
wings are. Here at the end of the downstroke, when
the wings are turning back into the upstroke,
the tips of the four wings collapse and roll under the wings.
They flatten back out as the wings are lifted back up and remain flat for the
whole downstroke. Some moths, like this leaf roller, get
into the air by combining the downstroke of their wings with a jump powered by
the middle and hind legs. Their wingtips also flex and fold at the
beginning of the upstroke when they're being raised back up.
Now this is a rosy maple moth. It doesn't jump or roll its wing tips up like those
others, but honestly who really cares? Just look
at it. It's clearly the best moth.
It looks like a flying muppet. Like after it flies off screen here
it's probably going to go all the way back to living its life on Fraggle Rock.
Okay, now for some more uncommon stuff. This is a giant stone fly, also known as
a salmon fly. And look at this thing, it has a
spectacular jump, absolutely gigantic hind wings,
and goes straight up and over right into a beautiful swan dive.
Stoneflies actually have a pretty interesting place in the field of insect
flight research. Immature stoneflies are aquatic and
adults hang around the water too.
Adults of some species are known to use their wings for skimming themselves
across the water.
Because the body of the insect is supported by water, surface skimming can
be achieved with rudimentary wings, ones are actually incapable of powering flight.
So, surface skimming has been proposed as
an example of how early insect proto-wings
might have still benefited the insects even before flight.
Another aquatic insect is this mayfly. Mayflies are an ancient lineage of
insects dating back to at least the permian, over 250 million years ago.
They are different from all the other flying insects in this video in two ways:
they are unable to fold their wings back over their body, and the muscles that
power the wings directly attach at the base of the wing. All the other
insects here flap their wings through indirect muscle movements
that contract and expand the thorax. Currently, stoneflies and mayflies are
the source of a debate in the insect fossil record.
In 2011 a description of this fossil was published.
It dates back to around 305 million years ago.
It's the oldest full-body impression of a winged insect.
The original researchers described it as a mayfly, however
others have claimed that it actually might better resemble a surface-skimming stonefly.
This is the biggest insect I filmed, it's
another one that spends most of its life as an immature aquatic organism.
This is a fish fly. Right after takeoff this individual is
flapping its wings at a relatively slow rate of 11 beats per second.
That's in the frequency range of what a big slow flapping butterfly does.
And they're usually using their wings to alternate between a powered flight and a glide.
The fore wing of that fishfly is 37.6 millimeters long.
That's nearly 10 times bigger than the 4 millimeter long wing
of the next insect, an aphid. Unlike most of the other insects in this video
it doesn't seem to jump to get into the air. Wing flapping just kind of picks it
straight up off the ground.
The oddest part about this flight is that every upstroke rotates the body
counterclockwise. Like watch the sequence again and notice
that on every upstroke the body ratchets backwards,
like the second hand of a clock in reverse.
Here're three more sequences, superimposed, in all of them you can see the same
body rotation on every upstroke of the wing beat.
This last insect is a scorpion fly. I love how this one gets into the air,
throws its leg up, and then just turns and kind of stares down the camera.
That scorpion-like tail means that this individual is a male. Although it kinda
looks like a stinger, that's actually a mating appendage.
Isn't slow motion flight footage the best? I'll leave you with one more
sequence over the credits. This is a green lacewing. This one's
actually been filmed and studied before, that's why it didn't make the main part
of this video. Before you go, be sure to subscribe
to the channel for more videos and thanks for watching this one.