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Mosquitos Have Little Trouble Flying in the Rain
sciencehabit writes with an interesting article about the (surprisingly not well studied) effects of rain on flying insects. From the article: "When a raindrop hits a mosquito, it's the equivalent of one of us being slammed into by a bus. And yet the bug will survive and keep flying. That's the conclusion of a team of engineers and biologists, which used a combination of real-time video and sophisticated math to demonstrate that the light insect's rugged construction allows the mosquito to shrug off the onslaught of even the largest raindrop. The findings offer little aid in controlling the pest but could help engineers improve the design of tiny flying robots."
Bats, unfortunately, aren't so lucky: "...these furry fliers need about twice as much energy to power through the rain compared with dry conditions."
AIUI, you assume wrong.
I am aware of that, but I didn't want to complicate things, in case the reader was not a physicist. Sometimes simple assumptions can still give you a clear indication of what is going on.
Give me a break, I wanted to write that comment that was as short, as quick, and as simple as possible. My conclusion isn't wrong ( in the literal sense ), I just made a "very" conservative estimation ( we do that in physics ). The whole point was to show, that the difference between a mouse and horse isn't small, but rather gigantic. I was not going into assumptions of density and its uniformity, or whether we can assume animals as spherical or not, or of buoyancy and drag factors. Now I agree with http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2894703&cid=40216663 , I should have mentioned that I was doing a very conservative estimation and the number is actually much higher.
Yeah but if you assume that they touch the floor at the same speed, the amount of energy to be absorbed per body weight is the same for mouse and horse. The force per body weight is even lower for the horse since it has longer legs and therefore more time to slow down. But also the ratio of the cross section of the legs to the body weight is worse, which makhttp://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/05/0112252/mosquitos-have-little-trouble-flying-in-the-rain#es it worse for the horse again.