Above is what happens when a water droplet, like from rain, smashes into a mosquito mid-air. How does the insect handle the collision? New research shows that the mosquito actually "rides the drop" down. From Science News:
The trick is breaking away from that drop before it and the insect splash into the ground. Mosquitoes that separate themselves in time easily survive a raindrop strike, Hu and his colleagues report online June 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Such studies help reveal how animals evolved to take advantage of flight, says biologist Tyson Hedrick of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mosquito tricks may also inspire engineers designing swarms of tiny flying robots, or interest physicists and mathematicians studying complex fluid dynamics at this scale.
"How a mosquito survives a raindrop hit"
