Just when you thought that wings were for flying ...
think again...
Many animals, e.g. dogs and insects, have an amazing sense of smell and can detect vanishingly small quantities of chemical signals with great specificity and spatial resolution. Shown here is a non-flying moth known as Bombyx mori – it fans its wings solely to enhance the sampling of chemicals (scents) in the environment.
Dr Antoinette Tordesillas (a mathematician from the University of Melbourne) in collaboration Dr Catherine Loudon (an entomologist from the University of Kansas) developed a mathematical model of airflow around antennae hairs to understand how insects “sample” a scent. Their work could one day help develop robotic chemical sensors for a variety of applications. Imagine the lives saved if we had small robotic insects that could fly into the tiniest of spaces and help detect survivors buried deep in the rubble after an earthquake, or a building explosion...
Loudon, C, and Tordesillas, A. (1998) “The use of the dimensionless Womersley number to characterize the unsteady nature of internal flow", Journal of Theoretical Biology 191, 63-78.