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Pictured here, a male Jamaican fruit bat in flight. The pink stripes on the wings are muscles that contract during downstroke. A study by researchers at Brown University found that bats appear to use a network of hair-thin muscles embedded in the membrane of their wing skin to adjust the wings' stiffness and curvature while they fly.
While birds and insects have stiff wings, information gathered during the study suggests that bats have evolved this muscular means of preserving or adjusting wing shape. The finding provides new insight about the aerodynamic fine-tuning of membrane wings, both natural and man-made.Image credit: Jorn Cheney, Swartz/Breuer Lab, Brown University
