If Guido Kaczka asked a participant of The 8 steps If you guess what an “unmanned aerial vehicle” is, you would probably answer “drone” and you would be right; But if I said “bat” should also go up a notch.
At least this was the spirit of the most recent achievement of the Argentine sciencewhich studies all the details of the mechanism that allows the bats (which are mammals, not birds) not only fly simply but develop one of the most sophisticated aerodynamic systems that exist in the animal kingdom. But for what?
So that the drones of the future can be perfected and reach their maximum unmanned flight prowess, imitating them.
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A scientist from CONICETtrained at the National University of Tucumán, and with a postdoctorate at the American Museum of Natural History (New York), led the work team of researchers studying the evolutionary past of primitive bats (chiropterans) to improve their technology.
Drones. They bring food to isolated areas, locate lost people and are also used in the military industry.
Norberto Giannini, It is about him, he is news in the scientific world for having led the paper that was published a few days ago in the prestigious organ that disseminates international scientific advances, Communications Biology, which belongs to the Nature group.
UAVs, an acronym that comes from English “unmanned aerial vehicle”more commonly known as drones, are increasingly a technological tool with greater applications, from location or rescue in inaccessible areas to the war industry. Having them as a model of aerial skill is the new objective of aeronautical engineering.
Current drones
“Drones, like the small onesParatos that are on Mars, are very rough still“explains Giannini, doctor in Biological Sciences and principal investigator of CONICET in the Lillo Execution Unit, who led an international team of scientists dedicated to revealing how bats began to fly in prehistory, a mystery that until now had not found an explanation. and that from now on could open the door to the development of drones and machines much more sophisticated than those hitherto known.
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Although the pandemic left them in a very bad position and they are not liked by ordinary people, bats are the perfect model of aerodynamics. They are the only flying mammals and provide one of nature’s three examples of the evolution of powered flight.
“Pterosaurs, birds and bats They are the only vertebrates with the capacity for powered flight, that is, flapping with wings – explains Giannini in a CONICET publication – and compared to insects, they are much larger. But today’s bats have a very sophisticated flight, because their wing apparatus is highly evolved and they have many operating details. We are looking for the oldest fossil bat ever discovered, to see how it began to fly. “How did he make that first transition from gliding to flying.”
Bat in flight. The new discovery confirms that from gliding to flight; Darwin He wondered how and the team led by the Argentine scientist answered it.
In The origin of species (1859), Charles Darwin had theoretically postulated that bats had gone from gliding to flying in the air. Today we know that this perhaps occurred thanks to mutations in the hand that made it palm-shaped and elongated, in such a way that it was integrated into a construction plan (construction plan) of pre-existing glider.
For the first time, Dr. Norberto Giannini’s team managed to verify this theory by combining three scientific advances:
have a computational model suitable enough to simulate the flight of primitive bats; have the oldest bat fossil on record: Onychonycteris finneyithat lived 52 million years ago, in the early Eocene. There are only two fossils, found in 2008 and preserved in Canada and New York; emulate the atmosphere of that timemuch denser than the current one, in order to establish the mechanisms involved in the evolution of powered flight in mammals in the environment in which they lived.
“Birds and mammals fly by flapping their wings, moving their wings and propelling themselves into the air. In contrast to other species that glide, such as the flying squirrel, bats use their muscle power and their wings. This transition is biomechanically very demanding, it is difficult,” explains Giannini.
“The bat developed its flight with one of the most sophisticated aerodynamic systems in the animal kingdom.”
“The challenges in the aerial environment for flying are many from a biomechanical point of view. The animal has to overcome gravity, the risks of crashing, falling. Furthermore, air is a thin fluid compared to water, so it is difficult to use it to move. Flying means passing energy into the air in a specific way. The same thing happens with a fish that is finning in the water, but the fluid medium is easier to operate from the point of view of the force that the animal can exert on the medium. The fin of a fish can be very small, while the wing of a mammal is comparatively very large. A very large anatomical structure is needed. Evolutionarily reaching that point is very difficult. It is one of the problems that Darwin posed, who spoke about the difficulty of this transition, and that we were able to verify. We show that the key fossil bat, Onychonycteris finneyi, was capable of gliding and flapping. A characteristic that supports the current gliding hypothesis about the origins of mammalian flight for aerodynamic reasons,” adds Giannini.
“We can point to a validation of the Darwinian theory that the origin of flight was from a glider to a flyer,” adds the scientist. “This means that other theories are weakened, which postulated that the origin of flight in bats could be from the ground, which postulates that the animals ran fast until they acquired speed and eventually rose and flew as is accepted today for birds.
In ‘The origin of species’Darwin theoretically wondered if bats had gone from gliding to flying in the air.”
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“In bats this is very unlikely, because their limbs are structurally different and they cannot run. Air is needed to circulate through the wings. The wings are what make the pressure difference that produces lift. The energy to move the wings originates from the muscles themselves beating the air. He air passes through the wings and there the lift is produced, the aerodynamic force that keeps it in that level flight. We demonstrate that the muscle strength estimated for the fossil is sufficient for that anatomy, both in normal and hyperdense conditions. And you can also plan, that’s what unites the two systems,” says Giannini.
Through their inferences, the scientists also observed that “the transition from gliding to flight It could even have happened before. Although we discovered that in a hyperdense atmosphere they could already sustain flight, it can be seen that the transition would have occurred in an even more primitive structure than the one we are observing in the fossil. That is to say, a more primitive gliding animal could have come before this fossil, which transitioned to flight,” shares Dr. Giannini.
What will continue then? “What we now want is to test these results with a real robotic version, not a computational model. We want to verify in physical reality what we saw theoretically,” the scientist anticipates. And there will surely be more news.
MM / ED