Advancing flight physics through natural adaptation and animal learning

TL;DR

This paper explores how studying animal flight and their natural learning abilities can enhance our understanding of flight physics, proposing a novel paradigm that uses animals as adaptive probes in fluid dynamics research.

Contribution

It introduces a new paradigm leveraging animal learning to study flight physics, integrating diverse experimental techniques and emphasizing natural adaptability as a research tool.

Findings

Different animal clades are studied with distinct measurement techniques.

Animals can serve as adaptive probes to investigate fluid phenomena.

A new paradigm for understanding flight physics through animal learning is proposed.

Abstract

Fluid dynamics, and flight in particular, is a domain where organisms challenge our understanding of its physics. Integrating the current knowledge of animal flight, we propose to revisit the use of live animals to study physical phenomena. After a short description of the physics of flight, we examine the broad literature on animal flight focusing on studies of living animals. We start out reviewing the diverse animal species studied so far and then focus on the experimental techniques used to study them quantitatively. Our network analysis reveals how the three clades of animals performing powered flight - insects, birds and bats - are studied using substantially different combinations of measurement techniques. We then combine these insights with a new paradigm for increasing our physical understanding of flight. This paradigm relies on the concept of Animal Learning, where animals are used as probes to study fluid phenomena and variables involved in flight, harnessing their natural adaptability.