Meeting Abstract
Flight feathers are the unique feature that enable birds to excel in flight and allow them to conquer the sky. Unfortunately, how flight feathers function has not yet been fully figured out. One mystery is how the morphological features of a feather relate to its aerodynamic performance. In particular, barb angle (as measured near the rachis) has been shown to correlate with feather function within the wing and not with vane asymmetry (Feo, Field, Prum, 2015, Proc. Roy. Soc. B 282:20142864, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.2864). However, one complicating factor is that many barbs are curved, and thus barb angle – with respect to the rachis – can vary across the width of feather vanes (Feo, Simon, Prum, 2016, J. Morphol. 277:995–1013, doi: 10.1002/jmor.20552). Therefore, to capture a more complete insight into barb angle variation and its relation to flight, we imaged flight feathers from species spanning the phylogenetic diversity of modern birds. These images were processed to obtain barb angles values across the width of the vane for two locations along the vane. This allows us to relate barb angle variation across feather vanes to flight style and feather function.
