Meeting Abstract
Bumblebees are diligent foragers whose wings amass significant, non-repairable damage in the form of wing area loss due to frequent collisions throughout their lives. Wing damage has been directly linked to individual mortality, but the changes in flight performance that underlie this phenomenon remain unclear. Previous work has shown that experimentally inflicted wing damage reduces a bee’s maximum acceleration during collision avoidance when ~20% of wing area is lost from both wings, but this effect is not significant for asymmetric damage to only one wing. The effects of asymmetric vs. symmetric wing damage on other aspects of maneuvering (such as tracking) and stability in complex aerial environments have not been tested, however. We filmed 25 Bombus impatiens flying in a 2.55 m/s headwind in three conditions: while tracking a flower oscillating laterally at 1.5Hz, in unsteady, vortex flow behind a vertical cylinder, and while tracking an oscillating flower in unsteady, vortex flow. Each bee was tested in all three conditions with three different wing treatments: intact wings, asymmetric wing damage (one forewing clipped ~20%), and symmetric damage (both forewings clipped ~20%), for a total of 9 flight trials per bee. We tracked three points on the thorax and used these to calculate changes in body position and orientation during flight. We found that both asymmetric and symmetric wing damage impair pitch and roll stability, and that wing damage negatively impacts maneuvering performance in the context of tracking. These results enhance our understanding of the ways in which wing damage affects insect flight performance, and highlight the importance of structural and behavioral mechanisms for mitigating damage associated with collisions.
