Integrative and Comparative Biology Advance Access originally published online on June 18, 2008
Integrative and Comparative Biology 2008 48(1):85-98; doi:10.1093/icb/icn054
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This article appears in the following Integrative and Comparitive Biology issue: Aeroecology: Probing and Modeling the Aerosphere–The Next Frontier [View the issue table of contents]
Aeromechanics in aeroecology: flight biology in the aerosphere
*Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA; Division of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA; Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139, USA
Correspondence: 1E-mail: sharon_swartz{at}brown.edu
The physical environment of the aerosphere is both complex and dynamic, and poses many challenges to the locomotor systems of the three extant evolutionary lineages of flying animals. Many features of the aerosphere, operating over spatial and temporal scales of many orders of magnitude, have the potential to be important influences on animal flight, and much as marine ecologists have studied the relationship between physical oceanography and swimming locomotion, a subfield of aeroecology can focus attention on the ways the biology of flight is influenced by these characteristics. Airflows are altered and modulated by motion over and around natural and human-engineered structures, and both vortical flow structures and turbulence are introduced to the aerial environment by technologies such as aircraft and wind farms. Diverse aspects of the biology of flight may be better understood with reference to an aeroecological approach, particularly the mechanics and energetics of flight, the sensing of aerial flows, and the motor control of flight. Moreover, not only does the abiotic world influence the aerospheric conditions in which animals fly, but flying animals also, in turn, change the flow environment in their immediate vicinity, which can include the air through which other animals fly, particularly when animals fly in groups. Flight biologists can offer considerable insight into the ecology of the aerial world, and an aeroecological approach holds great promise for stimulating and enriching the study of the biology of flight.
From the symposium "Aeroecology: Probing and Modeling the Aerosphere—The Next Frontier" presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, January 2–6, 2008, San Antonio, Texas.