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."

Comments

Re:Impact energy not the same for small objects

[techno-vampire]

I am aware of that, but I didn't want to complicate things, in case the reader was not a physicist.

I'm not a physicist; I don't even play one on TV. And yet, I spotted your error. I wouldn't have commented if you had, as an example, assumed a spherical horse (and mouse) of uniform density because that would just have emiminated some messy complications. Instead, you made an asumption that you knew was wrong and that led you directly to a wrong explanation.