Researchers have captured the process of a bat's "power flight" on an X-ray video, the stunning footage revealing how these winged creatures prepare for takeoff, Smithsonian Magazine reports. Though bats may be the only flying mammals, scientists have long puzzled over how they begin their sustained flight.
A group of scientists at Brown University led by Nicolai Konow used XROMM (X-Ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology) technology that integrates 3D renderings of animals' bone structures into X-ray video. XROMM data allows for a detailed analysis of an animal's muscle mechanics and anatomy as they move.
Konow and his team took ultrahigh-speed X-ray video footage of fruit bats (specifically Sheba's short-tailed bats), documenting how the animals lift themselves off of the ground. They discovered that the extra-stretchy biceps and tendons of a bat store and release energy needed for takeoff. They presented their analysis today at a meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology, the slow-motion footage showing the way the bats stretch our their tendons that anchor their bicep and tricep muscles to their bones before compressing their tendons to power them upwards.
"By combining information about skeletal movement with information about muscle mechanics, we found that the biceps and triceps tendons of small fruitbats are stretched and store energy as the bat launches from the ground and flies vertically," Konow explained.
This discovery is surprising to biologists, who had previously believed that the tendons of small mammals are stiff and thick and incapable of such stretching. Bats however, are a truly unique mammal with over 1,240 species, and the new X-ray footage is further proof of this.
The team also used fluoromicrometry, in which small chemical markers are implanted into muscles, to allow for measurement of changes in muscle length during contractions with high precision.
