International Congress of Odonatology 2017 flight session
The International Congress of Odonatology 2017 (ICO2017) will be held in the Gillespie Centre at Clare College Cambridge from 16 to 20 July 2017.
Registration will be on Saturday 15 July.
Special Session: flight
A special session on dragonfly flight to celebrate the work of Charlie Ellington will be held in the Gillespie Centre at Clare College Cambridge
[Chair Richard Rowe]
Since the pioneering work of Torkel Weis Fogh in the 1960s the influence of scale and transient effects in insect flight has been clear. Weis Fogh’s work was continued and developed by his student Charlie Ellington, who expanded studies into the far more complex situation produced by the four independently controlled wings of dragonflies. This session is to celebrate Charlie’s many contributions.
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A special session on dragonfly flight to celebrate the work of Charlie Ellington will be held in the Gillespie Centre at Clare College Cambridge on the afternoon of 16 July.
[Chair Richard Rowe]
Since the pioneering work of Torkel Weis Fogh in the 1960s the influence of scale and transient effects in insect flight has been clear. Weis Fogh’s work was continued and developed by his student Charlie Ellington, who expanded studies into the far more complex situation produced by the four independently controlled wings of dragonflies.
This session is to celebrate Charlie’s many contributions.
An introductory handout will be provided
The introduction of high resolution, high speed, film and video technology has enabled us to see how dragonflies fly in far greater detail: a blur of wings, or single high speed flash photograph can now be resolved as a dynamic process.
Georg Rüppell: Kinematics of dragonfly flight (a commentated video ).
Underlying flight processes is the wing – a highly specialised structure that characterises Odonata. Understanding the evolution of the wing and of its detailed mechanics are essential to analysing how dragonflies fly as they do.
Ed Jarzembowski and Daran Zheng: Evolution of the odonate wing.
Stas Gorb, Esther Appel and Hamed Rajabi : Structure and properties of dragonfly wings: composite structure of fibrous material supplemented by resilin.
Günther Pass: Insect wings are not “dead” cuticular structures.
So how do dragonflies fly?
Robin Wootton: The flight of Odonata: uniqueness and diversity, answers and questions.
Reduction of dragonfly flight processes to the underlying basic physics is a difficult problem. With four wings controlled independently, yet interacting aerodynamically, all at that nasty scale level where simplifying assumptions can only be made with great care, understanding dragonfly flight is a major intellectual challenge.
Fritz-Olaf Lehmann: Wing phasing in dragonflies.
Richard Bomphrey,Toshiyuki Nakata, Per Henningsson, Huai-Ti Lin: Flight analysis, aerodynamics and flight modes.
Understanding of the detailed processes involved in flight must then be integrated into a synoptic review of ‘what does it all mean’ as we move from the fundamental physics to how it is expressed in, and consequences for, the living animal.
Stacey Combes: More Than One Way to Capture Prey: Comparative Flight Biomechanics and Capture Strategies of Hunting Dragonflies.
And … the last word is with the dragonflies.
Dagmar Hilfert-Rüppell: Flight variations in coloured-winged dragonflies (a further ‘Rüppell’ team video).
Presenters:
Richard Bomphrey
Structure and Motion Laboratory, Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences, Royal Veterinary College, North Mymms, Hatfield AL9 7TA, UK
Stacey A. Combes
Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, University of California, Davis, USA.
Stanislav Gorb
Department of Functional Morphology and Biomechanics, Zoological Institute of the University of Kiel, Am Botanischen Garten 9, D-24118 Kiel, Germany
Dagmar Hilfert-Rüppell
Institut für Fachdidaktik der Naturwissenschaften, Bienroder Weg 82, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany.
Edmund A. Jarzembowski
State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China; Department of Earth Sciences, The Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD, UK
Fritz-Olaf Lehmann
Institute of Biosciences, Department of Animal Physiology, University of Rostock, Albert-Einstein-Street 3, 18059 Rostock, Germany
Günther Pass
Department of Integrative Zoology, University Vienna, UZA1 Althanstraße 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria
Georg Rüppell
Technical University Braunschweig, An der Wasserfurche 32 38162 Cremlingen, Germany
Robin Wootton
School of Biosciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon EX4 4SB UK
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The congress logo is a stylised Anax imperator male to represent Philip Corbet’s pioneering work on seasonal regulation in this species. Philip’s Ph.D research was carried out in the Zoology Department at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Vincent Wigglesworth, the renowned insect physiologist. Philip was his only ever ecology student.