A ladybird beetle spreading its wings captured with a high-speed camera. In real-time wing deployment from the fully folded state takes less than 0.1 seconds.
Video credit: University of Tokyo / Saito et al. 'Investigation of hindwing folding in ladybird beetles.' DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620612114.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1620612114
@wonderofscience That is superb. The whole article has images equally fascinating.
@wonderofscience direct link to the amazing video https://youtu.be/nbKgqJjppDM
@wonderofscience well that's another takeoff
@wonderofscience ...fascinating!
@wonderofscience its wings remind me of oragami in how the creases determine how certain movements will get it to fold and unfold in the same way every time!
@wonderofscience And then the ladybu says : "I'm batman" and flies away
@wonderofscience It’s the hidden turbo engines under the wings that allow fast takeoff.
@wonderofscience science is so boring.
@wonderofscience Hi. I'm fascinated by nature. Here's what i saw last November. I wasn't sure what was going on, did it's wings get stuck? The good news it that it was able to fly away. It's not allowing me to add the video, I'll sent it separately
Seeing how the wings neatly unfold, makes me wonder about the reversed process.
Landing and packing away these wings.
Totally amazing, isn't nature just majestic!
@wonderofscience it takes a darn sight longer for them to fold them up again, always thought they seemed quite vulnerable at that point as their wings are so fine.
@wonderofscience Flying cars got nothing on her.
@wonderofscience Would love to see a video of the wings being stowed under the shell, is it also effectively autonomous, or doe the ladybug use feet or mandibles to get the folds right for a later deploy.
And yes I understand that getting a slow-mo of that, isn't as easy. It's tough to get any creature to land on the focus point of any camera.
@wonderofscience holy shit! This is incredible.
@wonderofscience it deploys them one at a time :) probably has to concentrate on it, but somewhat faster than we are used to....
