Meeting Abstract

28.3  Friday, Jan. 4  How do bats turn? BERGOU, A; FRANCK, J; TAUBIN, G; SWARTZ, S; BREUER, K*; Brown University abergou@gmail.com

An animal’s ability to effectively maneuver is crucial to its survival. The importance of maneuvering is especially evident amongst flying animals, which have evolved a particularly impressive collection strategies. One of the simplest, yet most important, maneuvers amongst flyers is their ability to reorient their heading – or body yaw – in flight. Recently this mode of maneuvering has been investigated for several species of insects and birds showing a diverse array of evolved mechanisms to perform this simple maneuver. Here, we revisit this classical maneuver and investigate how bats perform low velocity turns. We use a model-based tracking framework to reconstruct detailed wing and body kinematics of maneuvering bats from high-speed video. Using this data, we simulate the aerodynamic forces on the wings of bats using both quasi-steady and direct numerical simulations. In turn, we use these aerodynamic models to construct integrated simulations of a bat to discern the mechanism that bats use to turn.