ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2017
On the autorotation of animal wings.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Precession dynamics and morphology of rolling samaras.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Maple samaras recover autorotation following raindrop collisions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Maple samara flight is robust to morphological perturbation and united by a classic drag model.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Superb autorotator: rapid decelerations in impulsively launched samaras.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Botanical samaras spin about their centre of mass and create vertical aerodynamic forces which slow their rate of descent. Descending autorotation of animal wings, however, has never been documented. We report here that isolated wings from Anna's hummingbirds, and also from 10 species of insects, can stably autorotate and achieve descent speeds and aerodynamic performance comparable to those of samaras. A hummingbird wing loaded at its base with the equivalent of 50% of the bird's body mass descended only twice as fast as an unloaded wing, and rotated at frequencies similar to those of the wings in flapping flight. We found that even entire dead insects could stably autorotate depending on their wing postures. Feather removal trials showed no effect on descent velocity when the secondary feathers were removed from hummingbird wings. By contrast, partial removal of wing primaries substantially improved performance, except when only the outer primary was present. A scaling law for the aerodynamic performance of autorotating wings is well supported if the wing aspect ratio and the relative position of the spinning axis from the wing base are included. Autorotation is a useful and practical method that can be used to explore the aerodynamics of wing design.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.