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Company History Key People News Newsletter Customer Profiles Contact Us Employment |
Category: Biotechnology Data Desk® Helps Trace the Anatomy of Flight in Bats Sharon Swartz's research on bats and their flight at Brown University has much in common with the work of aeronautical engineers. A member of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Swartz also teaches anatomy at the university's medical school. In her research, which combines biology with aerodynamics and materials science, she is studying bat wing and leg bones and what happens to them in flight. The living bat that Swartz is working with happens to be a large--very large--fruit-eating bat from Australia. The bones that comprise its five-and-a-half-foot wingspread are big enough to allow accurate measurements with the instrumentation currently available to her. Swartz, who has been a devotee of Data Desk since version 1.0, uses the program to analyze information from two in-flight experiments. In the first experiment, string gauges temporarily applied to the bat's wing transmit through a lightweight cable voluminous data on bone shape as it changes through the duration of flight. To find out where her findings on the bones of the real-time bat fit in with other bats around the world, Swartz collects measurements from many museum specimens of bats. She also obtains information on mammals that do not fly. Then she runs regression analyses relating the real-time bat to the museum bats and to nonflying mammals to reveal which characteristics are shared and might be associated with flight. High-speed videos supply the data for the second experiment. The camera tracks the changing position of the wing bones during flight and reveals the complicated path of the wing during a single beat. The position of the bones is recorded in terms of x, y, z coordinates, and Swartz explores these data with Data Desk's rotating plot. Analyzing bone position helps her understand why certain bone structures are necessary for flight. By looking closely at the bones of a living bat during flight, Swartz - with help from Data Desk - is able to draw some conclusions about how the animal, its flight, and flight in general have developed and might continue to develop. |
Name: Sharon Swartz Organization: Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University Location: Providence, RI Version: Data Desk on the Macintosh
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