Flying While Being Very Small

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Nature of Science, Biodiversity, Biological Evolution, Nature, Wildlife

Ed Hessler

How does an insect, 1mm long, manage to fly?

In this video (3m 31s) from Nature is a report on flight in the Feather Wing Beetle, which makes use of tactics which have not been known before. These beetles are the smallest known of all beetles and have a wide distribution world-wide. The Wiki entry notes that fossils have been found, the oldest from the Cretaceous is dated 125 and 99 million ya.

It is an example of a major idea in science called scale, one that the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) included in its cross-cutting concepts. The basic idea is that "proportional relationships between different quantities change as scales change."