Insects in Flight

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Nature, Biodiversity, Biological Evolution, Behavior

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.--Charles Darwin, from the last paragraph The Origin of Species

Examples of these lyrical words are found in this Ant Lab video (8 m 39s) by Adrian Smith, North Carolina Museum of Natural History, on insect flight.  The focus is on takeoff  and was made in very slow motion allowing to see these amazing flights that we can't otherwise notice.. (The fps--frames per second--is 3200. Standard movies are shot at 24 fps.). The result are breathtakingly beautiful--"most wonderful".

What is even nicer is that the insects are not the common ones you might expect. They represent eight different taxonomic orders.