Scare Effect of Robotic Dino Wing Flaps on Insects

If some dinosaurs had wings and flapped them would that frighten insects into fleeing? This study tried to tease out a likely answer, by making and using a dino-like robot. The video shows some of what happened.

The study is: “Escape behaviors in prey and the evolution of pennaceous plumage in dinosaurs,” Jinseok Park, Minyoung Son, Jeongyeol Park, Sang Yun Bang, Jungmoon Ha, Hyungpil Moon, Yuong-Nam Lee, Sang-im Lee, and Piotr G. Jablonski, Scientific Reports, vol. 14, article 549, 2024. The authors write:

“We evaluated the escape behavior of grasshoppers to hypothetical visual flush-displays by a robotic dinosaur, and we recorded neurophysiological responses of grasshoppers’ escape pathway to computer animations of the hypothetical flush-displays by dinosaurs. We show that the prey of dinosaurs would have fled more often when proto-wings were present, especially distally and with contrasting patterns, and when caudal plumage, especially of a large area, was used during the hypothetical flush-displays.”

Reminiscent of Two Ig Nobel Prize-winning studies

This study evokes memories of two projects that won Ig Nobel Prizes.

The 2015 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded to Bruno Grossi, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. Vásquez, and José Iriarte-Díaz, for observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken then walks in a manner similar to that in which dinosaurs are thought to have walked.

They documented that work in the study “Walking Like Dinosaurs: Chickens with Artificial Tails Provide Clues about Non-Avian Theropod Locomotion,” Bruno Grossi, José Iriarte-Díaz, Omar Larach, Mauricio Canals, Rodrigo A. Vásquez, PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 2, 2014, e88458. The paper is accompanied by a video:

The 2005 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie “Star Wars.”

They documented that work in the study“Orthopteran DCMD Neuron: A Reevaluation of Responses to Moving Objects. I. Selective Responses to Approaching Objects,” F.C. Rind and P.J. Simmons, Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 68, no. 5, November 1992, pp. 1654-66.