Lens of Time: Tiny Fliers

Produced by Katie Garrett

For as long as humans have existed, we’ve marveled at flight. Bound to Earth for virtually all of our history, we’ve looked at winged life with awe and envy—and more recently, for inspiration. From Leonardo DaVinci’s flying machine to today’s B-2 bomber, birds have been models for human flight, and insects, particularly dragonflies, have been the basis for some of science fiction’s most iconic vehicles, such as Dune’s ornithopter. But human bias—against bugs perceived as pests and toward animals large enough to see easily with the naked eye—has led us to largely overlook flying inspiration from some of our planet’s most diverse groups of fliers, such as flies and other insects known as whiteflies (family Aleyrodidae).

There are more than 120,000 species of fly known to science, as well as some 80,000 species of Hemipterans, the group to which whiteflies belong. With so much diversity comes myriad adaptations for flight, some familiar and others altogether different. “The larger insects use some of the same methods of lift generation that airplanes use,” says David Murphy, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of South Florida. “But…when you go down to something that’s a millimeter in size, all of a sudden, the aerodynamics get really, really strange.” To uncover how tiny fliers stay aloft, Murphy and other researchers in his lab are using high-speed cameras and microscopic lenses to tease apart the flight patterns of grain-of-sand-sized whiteflies. What they’ve found is changing our understanding of small-scale flight and might inform the design of next-generation aerial micro vehicles.