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Hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground

Adaptations to flow have already been in the focus of early stream research, but till today morphological adaptations of stream insects are hardly understood. While most previous stream research focused on drag, the effects of lift on ground-living stream insects have been often overlooked. Stream m...

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Autores principales: Ditsche, Petra, Hoffmann, Florian, Kaehlert, Sarah, Kesel, Antonia, Gorb, Stanislav
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10006037/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36841919
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00359-023-01620-2
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author Ditsche, Petra
Hoffmann, Florian
Kaehlert, Sarah
Kesel, Antonia
Gorb, Stanislav
author_facet Ditsche, Petra
Hoffmann, Florian
Kaehlert, Sarah
Kesel, Antonia
Gorb, Stanislav
author_sort Ditsche, Petra
collection PubMed
description Adaptations to flow have already been in the focus of early stream research, but till today morphological adaptations of stream insects are hardly understood. While most previous stream research focused on drag, the effects of lift on ground-living stream insects have been often overlooked. Stream mayfly larvae Ecdyonurus sp. graze on algae on top of the stones and therefore inhabit current exposed places in streams. They have a dorso-ventrally flattened body shape, which is known to reduce drag. However, this body shape enhances lift too, increasing the danger for the animal of getting detached from the substrate. Using microscopic techniques, 3D-printing, and drag and lift measurements in a wind tunnel, our experiments show that the widened femora of Ecdyonurus sp. can generate negative lift, contributing to counterbalance the (positive) lift of the overall body shape. The larvae can actively regulate the amount of lift by adjusting the femur’s tilt or optimizing the distance to the ground. This shows that morphological adaptations of benthic stream insects can be very elaborate and can reach far beyond adaptations of the overall body shape. In the presented case, Ecdyonurus sp. takes advantage of the flow to overcome the flow’s challenges. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00359-023-01620-2.
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spelling pubmed-100060372023-03-12 Hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground Ditsche, Petra Hoffmann, Florian Kaehlert, Sarah Kesel, Antonia Gorb, Stanislav J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol Original Paper Adaptations to flow have already been in the focus of early stream research, but till today morphological adaptations of stream insects are hardly understood. While most previous stream research focused on drag, the effects of lift on ground-living stream insects have been often overlooked. Stream mayfly larvae Ecdyonurus sp. graze on algae on top of the stones and therefore inhabit current exposed places in streams. They have a dorso-ventrally flattened body shape, which is known to reduce drag. However, this body shape enhances lift too, increasing the danger for the animal of getting detached from the substrate. Using microscopic techniques, 3D-printing, and drag and lift measurements in a wind tunnel, our experiments show that the widened femora of Ecdyonurus sp. can generate negative lift, contributing to counterbalance the (positive) lift of the overall body shape. The larvae can actively regulate the amount of lift by adjusting the femur’s tilt or optimizing the distance to the ground. This shows that morphological adaptations of benthic stream insects can be very elaborate and can reach far beyond adaptations of the overall body shape. In the presented case, Ecdyonurus sp. takes advantage of the flow to overcome the flow’s challenges. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00359-023-01620-2. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2023-02-26 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC10006037/ /pubmed/36841919 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00359-023-01620-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Original Paper
Ditsche, Petra
Hoffmann, Florian
Kaehlert, Sarah
Kesel, Antonia
Gorb, Stanislav
Hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground
title Hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground
title_full Hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground
title_fullStr Hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground
title_full_unstemmed Hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground
title_short Hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground
title_sort hydrofoil-like legs help stream mayfly larvae to stay on the ground
topic Original Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10006037/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36841919
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00359-023-01620-2
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