Flight videos deconstructed

This week’s post isn’t entirely scientific, but I thought I’d upload it anyway since it’s related to animals and patterns in nature. When I worked in an insect lab as an undergrad, I helped out with an experiment about mosquito larvae. As part of the process we used a Matlab program to manually input the larva’s location during thousands of video frames.

It was a fun experiment, and I wanted to make something similar from Youtube videos. I found slow-motion videos of five flying species, and mapped out specific points on the wings during one wingbeat. I ended up with 15 frames per wingbeat, and I connected every frame using imaginary curves that went through all of the 15 mapped points. Of course, 15 frames isn’t nearly enough for any kind of factual conclusion, so this week’s post is just an art exercise. But hopefully you can enjoy this as an artistic pattern based on real life.

• Sources

• Bats in Slow Motion 2 by the Cranbrook Institute of Science. Life in the Undergrowth by David Attenborough. Geese taking flight by Edward Tufte. Hummingbird in slow motion by Masateru Maeda, Chiba University. Moth feeding from a flower by the Riffell Lab, University of Washington.