The Science Behind How Insects Fly in the Rain

Imagine walking down the street and suddenly being pelted by bowling balls. It sounds horrible, but this is what it's like for an insect caught in a rainstorm.

Image Credit: Pexels

Now, for us getting caught in the rain is, I don't know, annoying maybe. But for a mosquito or a dragonfly or a butterfly, or any flying bug, this is a potentially dangerous problem that they have to solve in order to survive.

Luckily nature has furnished them with a really cool secret weapon, this is waterproofing property or what other scientists call super hydrophobicity. It doesn't stop at bugs, you see. Birds, too, and many plants have developed similar adaptations to render their bodies extremely unfriendly to water.

Today, we are going to learn about the insanely cool living nanotechnology that makes this work. We are also gonna know about some of the strange ways that water behaves at small scales and how all of this is inspiring humans to develop super waterproof surfaces for everything from aircraft to solar panels.

Image Credit: Pexels

Mosquitoes are really lightweight and when a raindrop hits them it's the equivalent of a person getting hit by a car. So it's a big deal for them, but if we get hit with something that's 50 times our weight, we die. But mosquitoes survive these raindrop impacts.

So, when we get hit by a raindrop, we feel the equal and opposite force that our body applies back to it. Since we have a high inertia, we tend to resist the effect of a small force on our body.

But, when a mosquito gets hit by a raindrop, it just goes along with it. It can't stop the raindrop because it's not resisting the force. Instead, they move along with it and they get a much reduced force when they get hit by a large weight.

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That's really interesting, small insects like mosquitoes and flies deal with raindrops but not resisting them at all. 

Here's an interesting way to think about this, Imagine trying to pop a balloon by punching it. That's impossible because the balloon doesn't resist your motion at all. But this also isn't the whole answer.

Image Credit: Pixahive

Because water can warp around small insects and trap them. That's deadly because at those small scales, the stickiness of water is equivalent for us to pull ourselves out of molasses or something.

What about big insects, like dragonflies or butterflies? They are massive enough that, unlike a mosquito, they don't just fly in the other direction when they get hit by a raindrop. Instead, they have built their wings in a way that water can't stick to them.

Many of these insects are hydrophobic. They are water-repellent by having tiny pockets of air on their skin. They have small heirs and structures that prevent water from seeping in.

Image Credit: Pexels

In fact, If you look at water strider insects that walk on water, they seem to be standing on it. This is because their hairs are so numerous, they have got 10,000 hairs per square millimeter. 

We even find these rough microscopic surfaces on some plants, which cause water to roll off their leaves, keeping them clean in the process. Even some bird fathers can do this, like the kingfisher, a bird that much of its life spends in water.

The microscopic structures on the wings of butterflies or feathers of birds create a super hydrophobic effect. When a droplet of water falls on them, such structures reduce the contact time and allow the water to roll off quickly. This keeps the animal dry and less affected by moisture.

This is a critical thing because the less time that a droplet is in contact with the wing, the less momentum that it can transfer, keeping the insect more steady in the air. That also means less time for the water droplet to suck heat out of the animal, so it doesn't get cold.

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Scientists are using these natural structures as an inspiration to develop rough, super hydrophobic structures for everything from airplane parts to solar cells.

It's amazing to see the incredible ways in which nature and the living world have solved these extreme engineering problems, thanks to the power of evolution, natural selection and a few hundred million years of trial and error.

Stay curious, because the wonders of nature never fail to amaze!

SOURCES: PBS / Springer Nature